


angels in the architecture

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Filed under: things I have no excuse for, Gen, M/M, Supernatural AU - Freeform, au big bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-26
Updated: 2012-08-26
Packaged: 2017-11-12 23:32:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/496891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is human. Humans are fragile. Breakable. Impossibly strong, too, in ways that anything that's not human can barely understand.</p><p>John is human, and so he is loyal. He has faith. But he has doubts, too, and courage. Anger and sorrow. Hatred, and love enough to spare.</p><p>John Watson is human. Sherlock Holmes is not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	angels in the architecture

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2012 AU Big Bang. 
> 
> Many thanks to everyone who's helped with this story, especially xerxesbreak to Leah the ever-patient beta. I literally could not have written this story without you guys and your ideas, your suggestions, and your amazing ability to kick my ass into gear. Also thanks to my roommates, who have been amazingly patient with my frantic bouts of late-night writing. You all rock, and I owe you cookies <3
> 
> Special thanks to my wonderful artist slowsunrise, who worked really hard around a chaotic schedule to make the amazing art for this story. You are fabulous, dear! I hope your schedule evens out soon!
> 
> Art masterpost can be found [here](http://slowsunrise.livejournal.com/72624.html).

"The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we know them only when they are gone." -George Elliot

 

 

angels in the architecture

 

i.

“Sherlock,” John says, throwing down his coat and kicking off his shoes, “is there any particular reason why I’m being followed?”

Sherlock doesn’t even look up.  “You’re being followed?”

“To and from work.  Saw the same men on the tube both ways.” 

“What did they look like?”  John’s pretty sure this is part of Sherlock’s ongoing—if half-hearted—effort to mold John in his image, or something, and he rolls his eyes. 

“Average.  Taller than me—”

“Everyone’s taller than you, John—”

“Taller than me, yes, Sherlock, _thank you_ , wearing dark coats, sunglasses, one of them had a hat.  I thought they might be Mycroft’s people, actually.”

“No,” Sherlock says, straightening up.  “You’ll never see Mycroft’s people.”

John wants to say _thank you for the paranoia, Sherlock, really,_ but he decides to keep his mouth shut.  It’s never a good idea to get Sherlock talking about Mycroft.  Ever. 

“Interesting,” Sherlock is saying.  Has he been talking this whole time?  “Maybe I’ll go to work with you tomorrow and get a look at these men for myself.”

“Oh no,” John says.  He thinks of Sherlock running loose in the surgery and winces.  “No, that won’t be necessary.  I’m sure it’s nothing.” 

Sherlock finally looks up from whatever he’s doing—the table is smoking faintly, wonderful—and blinks at John, studying him. 

“It’s no great mystery,” John adds hurriedly.  “It’s just some chaps on the tube, I’m sure they work close by.”

“But—”

“No buts,” John says sternly.  “The last thing I need is you terrorising the patients. Stick to Lestrade-approved mysteries, please.”

Sherlock glares for a moment and then vanishes back into his work.  John clearly hears something about Lestrade and a horrible lack of crime in London, which should concern John but doesn’t, because he’s used to it by now. 

“Probably just imagining things,” Sherlock mutters, sulking.  John ignores him. 

John sits down with a sigh, settling in to his favourite armchair.  He blinks sleepily.  The kettle’s all the way across the room.  He wants tea, but tea means getting up, and he _does not want_ to get up.  At all. 

“I think you’re rubbing off on me, Sherlock,” John mutters.  Why is the kettle so far away? 

“Mm?” 

“The kettle’s too far,” John explains. 

Sherlock, being Sherlock, understands.  He still doesn’t look up, which means he’s not going to make John tea. 

Damn it. 

“There’s a cuppa on top of your laptop,” Sherlock murmurs.

John blinks, startled, and sure enough there _is_ a cup of tea balanced on his Mac. 

Strange.

“Did Mrs Hudson make this?”

“No,” says Sherlock.  “I did.”

John eyes it.  It’s not even remotely warm, and it looks like there’s too much milk—or possibly not enough honey—and a few stray leaves float around on the top of the cup.

It’s probably drugged. 

John shrugs, and drinks it anyway in one long, choking gulp.  When he comes up for air, he notices Sherlock quirk a tiny smile and then quickly pretend he didn’t.

John smiles, wincing at the taste, and grabs his laptop. 

Life at 221b goes on.

\-----

Except, a month later, John is still seeing those same two men in the tubes, and now he’s noticing other things as well.

Like a week ago, when he was going through his locker at work and found a little bag filled with animal bones, dried herbs, and a piece of cloth.  And then four days ago, when he found another little bag in his nightstand, and another above the door. 

Or two weeks ago, when someone slipped hastily-drawn pentagram-things into one of his reference books and his work bag.

Or last night, when he passed by the window and, by chance, saw one of those same suited men staring up at 221b, and then when John looked back, was gone.

It’s little things like this that add up and niggle in the back of John’s mind, feeding his paranoia.  (Not that he’s a paranoid person by nature, it’s just that after spending so much time with Sherlock, he’s seeing threats in every shadow, and this is just plain _weird._ )

So he adapts.  He starts carrying his old service gun, and knives in his belt.  He takes up walking with the cane again—though his leg doesn’t hurt—and makes sure he remembers all of his old army training. 

And he waits.

The men in the tubes never attack him, but they get closer and closer.  John thinks about telling Sherlock, but Sherlock is on some case or other—one he refuses to share with John, by the way, the stingy bastard—and so is rarely in the flat, and when he is he’s a mess of nicotine patches and frantic energy.  John feels it’s best to just leave him alone, for a bit.

Besides, there’s nothing going on.  He’s just imagining things, is all.  He’s tired, working at the surgery again, and more than a little paranoid.  PTSD, and all that.

He deals with it. 

And then someone breaks into his locker at work. 

Nothing is missing, but his phone case is scratched—worse than what Harry did to it—and his jumper rumpled.  Someone has been in his things. 

His first thought is Moriarty.  It’s been months since they’ve seen him, even heard of him moving around, but still, John can’t get that thought out of his head, that Moriarty watches them, that he _hunts_ them. 

But no, Moriarty’s more subtle.  If he’d been inside John’s locker, John wouldn’tve known it. 

The two suited men, then.  John’s hand tightens on his gun, almost experimentally.  Are they watching him now?  Lurking around the corner?

He breathes.  That place between fight and flight, that _stillness,_ steals over him and he lets the adrenaline flood his system, down to his fingertips.  His heartbeat speeds up, his breathing deepens, and his hands are steady. 

John turns around and walks out. 

There’s no one outside, and no one on the tubes, but they’re there, he can _feel_ it.  He’s always known when he’s in danger. 

It’s why he’s so good at what he does, what he and Sherlock do.

_Sherlock._

For a second, he forgets where he is.  He forgets that he’s on a crowded tube beneath the city, surrounded by a thousand people.

All he can think is, _what if these people got into the flat?_  

John gets off at the next stop and takes a cab all the way to Baker Street.  Mrs Hudson is in her shop—she’s alright. 

The door to the flat is closed, locked.  Sherlock hasn’t come home yet, then, but John goes through everything twice, checking and rechecking for any signs of tampering. 

The flat is in its usual state of decay and disarray, but nothing, it seems, is out of place, not even the skull. 

John breathes a sigh of relief and lets the tension drain out of his fingers, propping his cane up against the fireplace.

“One of these days I’m going to just keel over,” he tells the skull.  It doesn’t answer him, of course—though with Sherlock’s things you never can be sure—and he frowns, noticing the shadow of something behind one of its blank eyes.

Gingerly, he lifts the skull, and his frown deepens.  Another one of those little bags, full of herbs and bones and cloth, sits on the mantle.  Behind it, hidden in the cracks, is a thin line of white powder.

_Cocaine?_

But John tastes it and no, it’s salt, and it runs all the way behind the mantle, around the room, and down to the front door. 

“This is just weird,” he mutters.  Is it one of Sherlock’s experiments?  ( _Though,_ says the rational, sharp part of his mind that Sherlock is so carefully coaxing, _what kind of experiment could it possibly be?_ ) 

John shakes his head.  He doesn’t even care, he’s not having it in his house.  When summer comes the ants will be all over it and that is _not_ a problem he’s going to explain to Mrs Hudson, thank you very much. 

He takes a wet rag to the salt, wiping up as much of it as he can find.  In the course of his quest he finds three more little bags and his annoyance is growing now.  He feels like someone’s playing a really elaborate joke on him, and he _does not like it._ He needs to talk to Sherlock. 

And, right on cue, as though thinking about the man can summon him from thin air, John’s phone goes off. 

_Come to Heron Tower.  45th floor.  Need you at once. –SH_

John glares.  Heron fucking Tower.  Of _course._

He goes anyway.  The cabbie doesn’t seem to mind the longer ride—more fare for him—and it takes twenty minutes to get from Baker Street to Heron Tower, and John leans his head back and stares up and up.

Sherlock’s near the top, it seems, and police officers swarm the ground floor.  Murder, then.  An interesting murder, one that Lestrade wanted Sherlock on. 

That old rush of _danger_ tingles down his spine and he slips under the police tape and into the tallest building in the city. 

The elevator is empty, despite the many, many men and women milling about.  The upper floors have been cordoned off, it seems.  John would hate to deal with _that_ PR nightmare. 

When he gets to the forty-fifth floor, he is alone, except for Sherlock and the body.

Sherlock is standing by one of the big glass windows, looking down at the people below.  It probably gives him a god complex or something, being this high while everyone else is so low.

John clears his throat, and Sherlock looks up.

“John,” he says.  “About time you got here.  Well?  What do you think?”

“Think of what?” John snaps. 

“The body, the _body,_ John!” Sherlock says in his stay-with-me-you-bumbling-idiot voice.  He gestures down, sharp and jerky.  His eyes are too-bright.    

John looks. 

The body is a mess.  It was a man once, he thinks.  He can’t really tell—the poor sod has no face. 

Blood soaks the rich creamy carpet and the windows and John’s shoes, so much blood it can’t possibly be from just one person. 

It’s impossible to guess what the cause of death is.  Massive trauma, if John had to guess.  There are so many wounds he can hardly count them all—long ones, short ones, deep and shallow, some that look like knife wounds, others that look disturbingly like bites.

And the victim’s face is missing.  Gone.  Clawed clean off.

It is only years of medical experience and the memory of war that keeps John from throwing up.

“Dear God,” he says.

“God had nothing to do with it,” Sherlock mutters, bending down.  His nostrils flare.  “What does that smell like to you, John?  Sulfur?”

John doesn’t want to get any closer to the body so he just nods. 

Sherlock frowns.  “Strange,” he mutters, mostly to himself.  “Here, of all places?” 

“Sherlock,” says John, stepping back and getting a wider look.  “The carpet’s been torn up.”

Sherlock smiles.  “Ah, yes.  So it has.” 

Together they peel it back, careful not to move the body too much, and underneath, drawn in what is clearly human blood, is a pentagram.

John’s blood runs cold. 

“Sherlock,” he says.  “Sherlock, this was in our house.”

“What?”

“A pentagram—I found them, one in a book of mine and another in my bag.  And these little bags of _something_ , dried herbs, bones, and all the salt in our house—”

“The salt?  What did you do to it, John?”  Sherlock’s voice has gone hard and flinty. 

“Cleaned it up,” John says, not grasping it, not yet.  “I had to, the ants would get at it—”

“And the bags?”

“Left them in the flat, I thought you’d want to—Wait.”  John narrows his eyes.  “Sherlock.  What did you do?”

“Nothing at all,” Sherlock says, straightening.  “It’s what _you’ve_ done, you _idiot._ I put the salt there for a reason!  The hex bags, too!  Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” 

John draws back, anger sparking alongside that old, battle-worn feeling.  “What _I’ve_ done?  I haven’t done anything!”

“You’ve exposed us,” Sherlock hisses, his eyes flashing.  “ _Damn_ it, we have to go—”

He grabs John’s arm before the doctor can twist out of his reach, and his grip is hard and surprisingly strong. 

“Let me go, Sherlock.”

“No,” says Sherlock, pulling him towards the elevator. 

The door dings and pulls open, and two suited men step out.  Their eyes are completely black, and John freezes. 

He knows them.

“Those are the men who followed me in the tube,” he says, and his voice sounds strange, detached.  The air is suddenly heavy and hot, like before a summer storm.  “Sherlock?”

More men and a woman, all suited, come around the corner, from another elevator, hemming Sherlock and John in. 

They all have completely black eyes, and John is uncertain.  _This is a dream,_ he thinks, backed against the windows, the victim’s blood pooling under his shoes.  _This has to be a dream._

Sherlock snarls, stepping in front of John like he’ll protect him, which is just ridiculous. 

John pulls out his gun.  It seems like the reasonable thing to do, given the situation. 

“Told you we’d find him if we followed this one enough,” one of the men says gleefully.  He smiles, and his teeth are _sharp._

 _Dreaming,_ thinks John, _I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming_ —

“Nowhere to run now, feathers,” another man croons, his black, empty eyes fixed on Sherlock.  “Nowhere to hide, and Daddy’s not gonna protect you now.”

“John,” says Sherlock.  He sounds calm.  “Do you trust me?” 

“Wha—”

“Do you _trust_ me, John?” 

“Yes,” John says.  He does.  He trusts Sherlock with everything. 

“Then don’t panic.  I have you.”  And he turns and there’s a blast of light, and the window shatters with a screaming crack, and then they’re falling _—_

 _Jesus fucking Christ,_ John manages to think.  _He threw us out a window._ The air whistles past, unnaturally loud, and Sherlock has an arm around his waist like an iron chain, anchoring John to his side, and they’re _falling_ —

Faintly, far away, he hears a terrible scream and a thunderous voice, and heat blisters the air.  A fireball falls past, and then another, and another.

John’s gun has long since fallen—he can’t fight back, he can’t shoot the fuckers, where is the _fire_ coming from—

And then a fireball slams into Sherlock’s legs and he howls, the force of it tearing John loose—

John falls, grasping for Sherlock, the ground rushing up to meet him—

Sherlock is on fire and so is John, and Sherlock roars in a voice that could splinter glass—

Another thunderous word and agony erupts through John’s head, down his spine, ripping open his chest, and the ground is rushing up to meet him—!

The last thing he hears is the rush of wings. 

 

 

ii.

When he was seven years old, John tried to climb a tree in his front yard.  It was an ancient, towering oak, gnarled and bent, and there was a branch just a few feet off the ground, a perfect starting spot for an adventurous little boy,

Harry told him not to do it.  Until she hit her teens she was always the more cautious one, the careful one.  She told him he’d fall.

John didn’t believe her.

So he climbed, holding tight to the rough bark.  He climbed and climbed, and finally, he reached the top of that tree. 

And then, he fell. 

Harry said in years afterward that it was horrible to watch.  He looked like a little bird up there, she said, pushed from the nest too early.

Everyone else said it was a miracle that he didn’t die, or even break a bone.  He fell, scratched himself up a little bit, and landed without any problems. 

 A miracle, they said. 

John doesn’t remember the fall all that well.  He remembers the top of the tree, the sunlight, the bark digging into his hands, and he remembers that split second of sheer terror as he lost his footing, but the actual fall is a blur. 

One moment he was up in the tree.  The next, he was down on the ground, blinking up at the sky while Harry and his mother screamed fit to wake the neighbours. 

In between, there’s nothing but the rush of wind, and the shadow of wide, strong wings against the tree.

\----- 

  1. He tries to tell them no, stop, please don’t, but the words won’t come. 



“John,” someone’s saying, over and over again, and under that there’s a low, steady hiss of words he can’t understand, words that make the air still in his lungs and his ears pop, shrill and baritone all at once. 

He writhes.  There’s a fire in him, spreading, oh god it’s spreading, swallowing him whole—

Dies.

There’s more heat, sharp and concentrated, a white fire in the center of his chest, right below his breastbone, and he arches off the floor, screaming—

“John,” someone says gently, calling him back.  “It’s alright now, John.  Sleep.”

Burned and broken, John does. 

\-----

When he wakes up again, he doesn’t hurt.  He feels different, rawer, and he doesn’t particularly want to open his eyes, but the fire is gone.

He lies still against a bed—not his own, it’s too soft—and focuses on keeping his breathing even.  He doesn’t remember much; the sound of wind, the bite of fire, a heat in chest that he thought would burn out his heart. 

He’s alive.  He doesn’t think he should be, but he’s alive and he’ll take that for now.  He’s also tired, and warm, and more comfortable than he remembers being in a long time.

If only he could get the voices across the room to shut up…

“We can’t move him,” someone—Sherlock?  The voice is deep enough, but it’s off, it’s different, it’s more, well, _more_ than Sherlock’s usual tones of sarcasm and long suffering—is saying.

“You can’t leave him here, either,” someone else—now _that_ sounds like Lestrade.  What on earth is he doing here?—snaps back.  “Sammael and his are looking for the both of you.”

“If I go, he should be fine,” the voice that sounds like Sherlock says.  “I’ve healed him.  He won’t die.”

The Lestrade one laughs, a short bark of disbelief.  “You don’t really think that you leaving him behind will keep him safe?  They know what he looks like, they know he’s important to you.  They’ll kill him just because they can, or worse.”

 _What’s worse than killing me?_ John thinks idly, letting it all wash over him.  He should get up and see what’s going on, but he really can’t be arsed.  He’s so comfortable, and his chest tingles pleasantly.  He doesn’t want to move. 

“They wouldn’t dare,” the Sherlock-voice snarls, and _that_ sounds a little bit more like Sherlock, fire and brimstone, a collected, vicious focus.  “I won’t allow it.  The sigils are already in place.”

“Sigils only do so much,” Lestrade-voice points out.  “And they can be broken.  They’ll come after him, you know.  Unless you can get him halfway around the world and out of sight, they’ll find him.”

Sherlock-voice huffs an irritated sigh, and there’s the sound of pacing back and forth across creaky floorboards.  The air smells like dust.  Wherever they are, it certainly isn’t 221b.  John wonders if he should be concerned.

“I can’t take him with me,” Sherlock-voice argues back.  “He’s only human. Sammael will send hounds after me, and his hordes.”

“So teach him to defend himself,” says Lestrade.  “I learned.  He’s a bright lad, our John.  He’ll pick it up.  He’ll follow you anywhere.”

“That’s the problem,” Sherlock murmurs. 

The floorboards creak and a door opens.  Lestrade sighs.  “Take care of him, Bahram.  Don’t forget he’s more fragile than you are.”

Sherlock—who the fuck is Bahram?—remains silent.  More footsteps, and the door creaks shut.  Lestrade is gone. 

John’s ears ring, comfortably heavy.  He can feel himself drifting again.  Then there’s a hand on his chest, familiar, weighing him down. 

“What am I going to do with you?” says Sherlock. 

John doesn’t answer.  He’s already gone.

\-----

When he wakes for the final time, he is alone. 

John sits up suddenly, his feelings of warmth and comfort gone.  He’s alone and he doesn’t like it—it makes his skin crawl. 

He stands up, and promptly falls down again.  Ow, fuck. 

The floor is cool, so he rests against it for a minute until the buzzing in his ears stops, and then he stands up carefully, taking everything in.

It’s not exactly a nice room.  There’s no paint on the walls and the floorboards peel upwards.  Bits of broken wood litter the ground, and a bright line of salt, not hidden this time, rings in the whole place. 

Written on the wall in big, blocky letters, is DON’T TOUCH THE SALT, JOHN –SH, as well as a mess of hastily-scrawled, vaguely familiar symbols John can’t make head nor tail of.  There are pentagrams on the floor and etched into the ceiling. 

He shivers.  The whole thing unsettles him in a way he can’t quite put his finger on.  He feels like he should remember this somehow.  He should know what these mean, he _does_ know, he just can’t quite get a hold of it.

He continues his exploration.  There’s a battered kitchenette and a dingy bathroom connected to the main one, just as sad-looking and pathetic as the first.  Pentagrams, some in old, dried ink and others in what is undeniably fresh blood, cover the floors and the ceiling and the walls.  Salt lines each window and the floor in smooth, unbroken lines. 

John is careful not to disturb anything, though his whole body screams _run!_ He stays put.  He doesn’t remember getting here but he remembers Sherlock with a hand pressed over his chest.  Sherlock was here.  He’ll know what to do.

Seriously, though, the whole place looks like something out of a bad horror film.  He’s half-expecting a man in a hockey mask to leap from the closet.  (He actually checks.  No psychopath, but there is an ungodly amount of guns and salt.  He leaves the salt but grabs a gun.  Better safe than sorry, his mum always used to say.)

He goes back to the main room and sits on the edge of the bed, his whole body poised to attack should someone who is not Sherlock come crashing through the door.

He waits. 

And waits. 

And waits some more. 

Finally, after at least two hours, he stands up and paces anxiously, back and forth among the pentagrams. 

 _This is all a bad dream,_ he thinks, and remembers thinking it before.  He frowns.  Where did he think that before?  What was happening?  It’s important, he knows it is, but he just can’t _remember_ —

Eventually he stops trying to remember—he is a doctor, he knows you can’t force things like this—and pads to the bathroom.  He remembers pain, but when he lifts the edge of his shirt to check, there are no wounds. 

 _Odd,_ he thinks, pulling up his shirt farther, but there’s nothi— _oh._

John stares.  He carefully prods at the edges of the thing.  Runs his hands over the slightly raised flesh.  Nothing. 

There’s a handprint on his chest.  A perfect, burn-red human handprint, with long, slender fingers, right below his breastbone. 

It doesn’t hurt.  It doesn’t feel like much of anything, actually, but it doesn’t hurt like a burn should.  He should know. 

Frowning, confused and increasingly alarmed, he examines the—scar, there’s no better word for it—and the rest of him, but there’s nothing.

The scar is it.

It shouldn’t be.  There has to be more, he remembers so much more pain than one little bit on his chest.  Fire on his back, his arm wrenching loose from its socket, his legs splintering as he brushed the ground—

He doubles over coughing, eyes watering as the memory comes roaring up to the surface.

He fell.  From the top of Heron Tower he _fucking fell,_ all the way to the ground before Sherlock grabbed hold of him and swept off—

“Ah,” says Sherlock dryly, opening the door.  “I see you’re awake.”

“What the _hell,_ ” John spits, once he’s stopped coughing, “happened?  _We fell off Heron fucking Tower!_ How are we still alive?” 

“So you remember already,” Sherlock says, calmly striding over and crowding John into the bathroom.  “I thought it would take longer, but I suppose I am out of practice.  You don’t seem to be experiencing any side effects, either.  Tell me, have you experienced any vertigo?  Any loss of balance or disorientation?  I’ve never done that particular healing before, I wasn’t sure how it would affect you—”

“ _Sherlock!”_ John yells, frustrated, confused, fucking _angry,_ and pushes the taller man.  Sherlock stumbles back, draws himself to his full height.  His eyes, usually a pleasant sort of blue-green, flash gray.

“Sit down,” he says in a deep, rumbling voice.

John can’t help it.  He sits.

“You’re going to hurt yourself, and I don’t have another healing in me,” Sherlock chides, crouching down beside John.  “Really, you’re more stubborn than most.”

“Than most,” says John, because frankly that’s ridiculous coming from Sherlock-I’ll-eat-when-I-pass-out-Holmes.

Sherlock shrugs.  “How are you feeling?” he repeats.

“Like I’ve been tossed of a fucking building, that’s how I’m feeling!”

“There was no other way out,” Sherlock says, unruffled.  He frowns.  “I didn’t mean to drop you.  The bastards have gotten cleverer since I’ve last seen them.”

John shudders, remembering black, empty eyes and smiles with too many too-sharp teeth.  “And when did you ever run into things like _that_?”

“It’s been a while,” Sherlock says mildly.  “So you’re feeling alright then?”

“How did we survive that fall?” John says helplessly.  “We were _falling,_ Sherlock.  How did we survive?” 

“You’re wounds have healed, anyway,” Sherlock continues, like John hasn’t said anything at all. 

Suddenly John is angry, wildly, stupidly angry, and he lurches to his feet with a cry.  “Answer me!  What happened out there? What were those _things?_ How did we survive?  What the hell is this burn thing?” He shoves up his shirt so Sherlock can see the handprint.

Sherlock hisses a breath, undeniable, terrifying _want_ flickering across his face, and he reaches out but stops himself.  John pulls away, fear flooding his system.  He can’t help but reach for his gun.

“Please don’t,” Sherlock says, and he sounds hoarse, raw.  “That won’t do much good, I’m afraid.”

“You’re one of them,” John says, because it makes sense now, of course it does.  Men with black eyes and supernatural powers, men with fire, men who can leap off a building and be completely okay.  “Aren’t you.”

Sherlock—if he is Sherlock, John’s not so sure anymore, he heard it called _Bahram_ —sighs, his expression dark.  “Fine,” he snaps.  “What happened was that we ran afoul of some demons.”

“ _Demons?_ ”

“Yes, demons, you know, Satan’s minions, hell-spawn, sulfur and brimstone, all that.  They’ve been looking for me for quite some time and now that I’ve been living with a human, they used you to track me.  They wouldn’t have been able to find us, I set up wards to prevent it, but you destroyed most of them.  They were able to follow you to me, and you know all the rest.”

“Demons,” John mutters, eyes wide.  “That’s not—that isn’t _possible._ Demons can’t exist!  They’re just stories, fairytales!”

“When you have eliminated the impossible,” Sherlock says sternly, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.  It is _impossible_ to have fallen off Heron Tower and survive, and yet we are here, so we did.  Therefore it is highly improbable that we’re being hunted by demons, and yet.”

“ _Demons,_ ” John says again.  This is all just a nightmare.  It has to be.  Demons, monsters—those are just stories kids tell each other at night to scare their little sisters.  They can’t exist.

And yet. 




Hell, he’s in a room with pentagrams written on every available surface.  Whatever he’s in the middle of, it certainly isn’t _normal,_ and Sherlock—or rather, the thing pretending to be Sherlock—isn’t telling him the whole truth.

He draws his gun.  “So,” he says calmly, more calmly than he feels (his hands are steady).  “What about you?  You’re a demon too, right?”

“A demon?”  Sherlock’s face scrunches together in distaste.  “Is that what you think I am?” 

“You _flew,_ ” John says, because he remembers now, remembers just brushing the ground and Sherlock grabbing on, swooping upwards like some great bird of prey.  “Get out of Sherlock’s body.”

Sherlock—the _thing,_ he has to remember, the _thing_ —laughs.  “Very good deduction,” he says, standing up with fluid, inhuman grace.  “Completely wrong, of course, but good.  You’ve been paying attention.”

John cocks the gun.  “Stay away from me,” he says.

The thing in Sherlock’s body paces forwards, almost feline in its grace.  It smiles again.  “Why, John?” it purrs.  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You’re a demon!  You’re possessing my friend!”

“Oh please, John, don’t be stupid.  I’ve always been here.  I’ve had this body for years.  I am your friend.”

“Liar,” John snarls.  “You’re a demon.”

Sherlock—the thing—sighs and stops, holding up broad, long-fingered hands.  “I am not,” he says. 

“You are.  You have to be.”

“I don’t _have_ to be anything,” the thing corrects.  “You asked, and I answered your questions.  We’re being hunted by demons.  Moriarty’s demons, to be exact, though that isn’t his real name. 

“What are you, then?”  John says challengingly, still aiming the gun right between the creature’s eyes.

The thing shakes Sherlock’s head.  “John, John,” it sighs.  “And here I thought you were one of the smart ones.  Come on now.  Use your head.  Demons don’t heal.  They don’t even fly, though they can if they chose.”

“I don’t understand,” John says, keeping the gun between him and the thing.  His heartbeat hammers against his ribcage and the new burn scar throbs, a sudden flash of pain.  “You’re not human.”

“No,” the thing acknowledges.  “Not in the least.”  He says it in the same way Sherlock once said, _I am a high-functioning sociopath,_ very quickly and with confidence, even a little pride.  And it all makes sense, doesn’t it, all of Sherlock’s little quirks and deficiencies, the coldness, the cruelty, the emotions that are faked, faked _well,_ but faked nonetheless.

Sherlock Holmes is not human. 

John blinks, curls his finger around the trigger.  Well then. 

“John,” says the thing gently.  “Put down the gun.  I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You’re a demon,” John says. 

“No,” says the thing.

“Then what are you, cause you’re sure as _hell_ not human.”

The thing wearing Sherlock like a coat smiles, wide, sharp, just a little bitter.  “I am an angel of the Lord.”

 

 

iii.

“You’re lying,” says John, and he doesn’t lower the gun. 

“Am I?”

The thing wearing Sherlock takes a step forward.  “Am I, John?”

“Yes, you’re lying, you have to be.  Angels don’t possess people, they don’t come ‘round murder scenes, they don’t look at suffering and misery like it’s some sort of _game_ to them, they help people!” 

“How would you know?” the thing rumbles, lips quirking.  “Have you ever talked to one?”

“Well, no, but I—”

“Have heard the stories, bought into the pseudo-Christian myth, yes, yes, I know.  Everyone has a little guardian angel on their shoulder protecting them from evil, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” John says.  He stares down the barrel of the gun, taking aim without even thinking.  A shot to the heart and it would be over.  Surely Sherlock wouldn’t want something else running around in his body.  Surely he’d rather die than let another creature take hold of his intellect and powers of deduction.  Surely he’d prefer a bullet to the heart—almost painless—to a life trapped in his own skin. 

The thing laughs.  It has Sherlock’s laugh, deep, quick, and its eyes glitter.  “Put the gun down, John.”

“No.  You’re in my friend’s body.  Get out.”

“I’d rather not,” the thing says, impatiently now.  “If I leave, the body will fail and die.  There’s no one in here but me, John.”

“Where’s Sherlock?”

The thing grins.  “There is no Sherlock Holmes.”

Silence.  John doesn’t even breathe.  Then, “You’re lying.”

“Is that your answer to everything?” the thing snaps.  “You’re confronted with something you can’t believe so you denounce it as a lie?  Have I taught you nothing?”

“You’re lying to me,” John says, a nervous pitch in his voice now.  He doesn’t dare drop the gun.  “You’re lying to me, you’re lying to me!  You have to be lying to me!”

“I don’t have to be anything,” the thing remarks.  “Think about it.  It makes sense, you know.  I am not human.  But I am no demon either.  For one, I can cross the salt.”  He gestures behind him at the unbroken line warding the room. “For two, I saved your life.  Would a demon really do that?”

“Demons possess people,” John says, and he remembers the stories, doesn’t he, the vague, frightening tales of men out in the sands, men who come back with claw marks and bites, babbling of black eyes and sharp teeth.  “Angels don’t.”

“Of course we do,” the thing says.  “We’d never get anything done if we didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because most humans cannot see or hear us,” the thing explains.  “We are beings from a higher plane, and the ordinary man can’t perceive our natural bodies.  So we take hosts.  Volunatarily, of course.  It’s not possession, it’s more like putting on a suit of clothes.  Once our business is done, we shed the clothes and move on.”

“How long have you been wearing Sherlock, then?”  John says, making it aggressive but quiet.  A threat, disguised as a question.  “A week?  A month?”

“Twelve years,” the thing hums. 

“ _Twelve_ —” He levels the gun.  Sherlock Holmes, trapped inside his body for twelve fucking years.  Maybe that’s what the thing meant, when he said there was no one in there.  Twelve years of imprisonment is long enough to drive anyone out of their own mind. 

“About that long.  I’m not very good with keeping track of the dates, but that sounds about right.  It was right before Sherlock Holmes was due to graduate from university, in any case.”

“You stole him,” John says.  “You put on his body and never gave it back, you’re a demon, you have to be—”

  1. Sherlock Holmes asked for this.”



“Why would he _ever_ do that?” 

The thing shrugs.  “He was dying.  Some congenital illness, if I recall correctly.  He was very sick, and he didn’t want his little hobby to die with him.  He tried other things before me, of course, but then he found my name in some old books and summoned me to him.”

John holds still, the muzzle of the gun aimed directly at the thing’s heart.  It would be over in less than a second. 

“At first, he wanted me to heal him.  I am not, however, a healer, though I’ve picked up some skill since I took his body.  The best I could do was promise him that, as long as I held his body, I would carry on his little hobby.”

“Deduction,” John murmurs.

The thing inclines its head.  “Deduction.  A very arrogant little creature, was Sherlock Holmes, but this body has suited me well, and he has more than earned his rest by letting me use it.”

“Why did you stay?  You kept your promise to him.  You didn’t take his body and ruin it, you didn’t turn to doing awful things.  You helped solve crimes.”

“An angel keeps his promise,” says the thing.  Disdain crosses those eyes, so bright, so otherworldly.  Things are falling into place now, things like Sherlock’s disregard for others, for even the basest of human functions.  He doesn’t eat or sleep because he doesn’t need to.  He is as close to heartless as humans come because he _isn’t human._

“You are not a demon,” John says, torn. 

The thing shakes his head.  “I am not.”

“You’re an angel.”

“Yes.  Or, rather, I was.  I have, as they say, gone native.  Apparently, that makes me something between the two.”

John slowly lowers the gun.  “This is insane,” he mutters.  “This doesn’t _happen_ to people.  Angels and demons, they’re just stories—”

“It doesn’t happen to ordinary people,” the thing—angel—says.  “But it happens.”

“What do I call you?” John asks.  He makes the decision in a second, and it’s a bit like falling off Heron Tower, except this time he throws himself off of it and prays there’s something down there to break his fall.

“What?”

“Your name.  What do I call you?  I heard someone say Bahram earlier.  Is that your name?”

Another flicker of distaste passes through those inhuman eyes.  “Sherlock is fine,” the thing says shortly. 

John rolls it around in his head.  “Sherlock,” he tries.  He doesn’t like it.  It doesn’t fit anymore, doesn’t match up what he knows his friend now is. 

Sherlock nods.  “Be careful of how you use my angelic name,” he says warningly.  “Names are powerful things.  Humans can barely understand them.”

John lowers the gun and straightens, suddenly awkward in his own skin.  “Sorry about that,” he says, and Sherlock barks a laugh. 

“You reacted as expected.  Most would have shot me before I got through the door, considering the facts.  It’s happened before.”

“You’ve told others?”

A short nod.  “Lestrade knows.  He thought I was a demon at first as well.”

“Lestrade believes in demons?”

“He’s a hunter.  Or rather, he was a hunter.  He’s retired now, I believe.”

“A hunter?”

Sherlock makes a careless gesture that means it’s not important, but John wants to know anyway.  “Yes, a hunter.  Humans who go after creatures like demons.  Wendigos, ghosts, pagan spirits, that sort of thing.  Quite a vicious lot, I understand.”

There are people who actually go _looking_ for monsters to kill?   

“Don’t look so surprised,” Sherlock says.  “You do the same thing with me.”

“I do not.”

“Of course you do.”  Sherlock waves his hand dismissively like he does when he’s annoyed, and John wonders if that’s the human or the angel in there, controlling that motion.  Where does one begin and the other end?

His head hurts.  He doesn’t argue.  Instead he sits down, careful not to disturb anything in case a), Sherlock’s right and there are demons prowling around out there in the darkness, waiting for him to make a mistake, or b) Sherlock is actually suffering a psychotic break and breaking one of these seals sets him off. 

He’s pretty sure it’s not B.  About eighty-five percent, anyway. 

“So tell me,” he says, once he feels like he has his wind back.  “You said that _Moriarty_ sent those things?”

Sherlock bares his teeth, and the expression isn’t even remotely human. (He’s beyond pretending, then.)  “Yes,” he says.  “Not that I am surprised.  I knew he would figure it out sooner or later.  Took him longer than I thought it would, actually.”

“What do you mean by that?” 

Sherlock gives him a sideways, impatient look.  “You didn’t understand much from the pool, did you.”

That stings a bit.  The condescension is familiar, though, so it’s nothing new, and John’s mostly conditioned himself out of bristling at the assumption that because he is not a genius he’s not intelligent at all by now.  “There was a bomb strapped to my chest and a psychopath in my room,” he says, just to put that out there.  “I was a bit preoccupied.”

The creature shakes his head, mouth twisting in annoyance.  “He recognized me,” Sherlock says.  “While you were busy flailing, Moriarty recognized me, and he has been hunting me ever since.”

“Doesn’t he know where we live?”

“Baker Street has been under sigil for the past seven months,” Sherlock says dismissively.  “And he has been outside of heaven for too long.  He doesn’t have the power he thinks he does, and he couldn’t break my sigils. So he used other methods.”

“Me,” says John.

Sherlock nods.  “You.  I knew I should have tattooed you, but Mycroft assured me that it wasn’t nearly so serious.”

“ _Tattooed_ me,” John hisses, feeling a bit like a parrot.  “Wait, your brother knows?”

“Of course he knows,” Sherlock says dryly.  “He figured it out almost immediately.  Tried to have me exorcised, actually.  Once I explained the situation, he dropped the issue.”

“I find that hard to believe,” John says, eyebrows raised.  He distinctly remembers sleek black cars and Mycroft’s haughty expressions, the determination he had to have to run the British government.  “He doesn’t seem the type to let his brother’s body be hijacked, if only because he didn’t order it himself.”

Sherlock’s lips quirk up.  “Accurate,” he allows.  “But I was stronger then, and he was up to his neck in the government.  He knew his brother was dying, anyway.  I think he was actually glad that someone would be keeping Sherlock around, at least in a physical sense.”

“And in a metaphysical sense?”  John asks, slightly apprehensive.

Sherlock’s eyes shutter closed.  “Sentiment,” he says.  “The human soul once known as Sherlock Holmes has gone on.”

“To?”  Heaven? Hell?  Somehow, John can’t imagine Sherlock Holmes in heaven, but then he only knows this one, who as it turns out really isn’t Sherlock Holmes at all. 

“To his chosen place of rest,” Sherlock says with a careless shrug.  “I allowed him to choose which realm he preferred, and sent him on his way.”

“What did he choose?”

“What suited him.”

John doesn’t know what that means, exactly, but he knows that tone, and it means Sherlock is going to make him figure it out.  John glares, but lets it drop.  He has too many other questions. 

“So Moriarty’s a demon too, then?”

Sherlock’s face darkens inexplicably.  The air grows hot and heavy, like it does before it thunderstorms, and the shadows in the room deepen.  “No,” he says.

Confused, John tilts his head.  “What then?  One of the things you mentioned earlier?  That hunters go after?  Wendigos, that sort of thing?”

The shadows, if possible, grow even deeper. “No.”

“Then what is he?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer, but his face says it all.

“He’s an angel too, isn’t he?”  John puts it together in a flash of inspiration.  It would explain everything, Moriarity’s familiarity with Sherlock, his own inhumanness, his own deficiencies.  “But that doesn’t make sense.  What’s he doing hunting you, and controlling demons?”

Sherlock sighs, annoyance and something more in the shadows around his eyes.  Some of the pressure in the room eases, and John gets the impression that his friend is holding back.  Reigning himself in. 

“Have you heard of fallen angels?” 

“Like the devil?”  John remembers the story, vaguely.  Something about Satan thinking he was higher than God and trying to take control of heaven, and he and his followers—a forth of the angels, or was it a third—being swept from the sky like falling stars.

“Yes, though Sammael didn’t fall until much later.”

“Sammael,” John murmurs.  The word tastes dirty, almost, leaves a harsh taste in his mouth.  He doesn’t like it much.  “Is that his real name?”

“Yes, and you’d be smart not to say it often. He can hear you.”

John’s eyebrows go up.  This is all straining the limits of credibility, really, and John Watson has seen some crazy shit, but even this is a little much.  _“Hear_ me?”

“Yes, hear you, he is—or rather, was, an archangel.  His powers are such as you can’t even begin to comprehend.”

“Oh, and you can?”

“Angel,” Sherlock reminds him.  “It has been a long time, but I still remember what my brothers looked like, and what they could do.”

“So if Samm—I mean, Moriarty, sorry—is a fallen angel, what are you?  Haven’t you done the same thing?”

Sherlock bares his teeth and the air hums, suddenly hot and heavy.  The scar on his chest burns, and he slaps a hand to it, startled. “No,” he rumbles.  “I am not.  I chose to live here.  I have not allied myself with hell, or chosen to rip out my grace.”

“Grace?”

Sherlock makes an impatient, angry noise, clearly fed up with all the questions now.  “Later,” he snaps.  “Now is not the time.  We have to move again.”

John stands up obligingly, leaning against the wall.  His leg hurts, for some odd reason. 

Sherlock bustles around the rooms, gathering things and stuffing them into his coat pockets, then turns to John with his head canted consideringly.  He looks like a bird when he does that, a raptor of some kind, a great bird of prey who has a tasty-looking mouse in his sights.  “You’re taking this well,” he says.

John shrugs.  “Way I see it, you’re either telling the truth and you’ll keep me alive, or I’ve finally gone insane and this is all a dream.  Either way I’m stuck here, so I might as well go with it.”

Sherlock almost smiles.  “Humans,” he says, and there’s a trace of fondness in his voice reserved for only John himself, Mrs. Hudson, and on very rare occasions Lestrade.  “Come,” he rumbles, hand outstretched.  “We are leaving.”

“London?”

“No,” says Sherlock, and John hears the faintest rustle of wings.  “England entirely.”

John hesitates.  He hasn’t left since he came back from the war, and this is home.  What about Harry?  What about Mrs Hudson?

“Your friends will be alright,” Sherlock says, impatient again.  “I placed sigils on all of them, and Moriarty won’t go after them.  It’s us he’s after now.  Everything else is a distraction.”

John nods, reaching out.  Sherlock’s giving off warmth like a space heater, and feathers rustle in a new breeze.  “Let’s go,” he says, and takes Sherlock’s hand.

 

 

iv.

Flying, as it turns out, isn’t nearly as fun as the cinema makes it out to be.  Mostly it’s a lot of wind and jerking around and John clinging to Sherlock for dear life, the roar of wind and wings in his ears.  When they touch down that first time, John gets sick.  The second time he doesn’t, but he’s queasy and miserable and really just wants to go home now, thanks.

“You’ll get used to it,” Sherlock promises.  “It gets easier every time.”

“Carry a lot of people around, do you?”  John snaps from where he’s curled up on a hotel bathroom floor.  The tile is cool against his face. 

“Not recently,” says Sherlock.  He’s busy laying down salts and sigils, settling them in for the night.  “Now come here.  We have some rules to go over.”

“Rules,” John mutters, like he’s a disobedient child, and really, when has Sherlock ever followed the rules?  He does whatever he wants to, whenever he wants to do it.  Such as grabbing his flatmate and going on an insane fucking fairytale adventure, complete with their own demon horde on their heels.

(Actually, John hasn’t seen a demon at all since leaving London, but he knows they’re out there.  Sherlock watches for them always.)

“Do not leave this room without me,” Sherlock says without preamble.  “If you do, do so carefully.  Don’t go anywhere that looks familiar.  Don’t trust anyone.  Anyone who looks like they might be following you probably is.”

“That’s a little paranoid, don’t you think?” 

Sherlock raises an eyebrow.  “You know what’s following us,” he says.  “If you want to be eviscerated by a demon, please, by all means, talk to strangers.  I’m sure they’ll leave enough of you for me to piece back together.”

John thinks about the man in Heron Tower, whose face was torn off.  From what he understands, that man was just a bystander.  He hadn’t done anything, didn’t even know Sherlock Holmes, but the demons needed to lure Sherlock out and trap them, so they killed the poor guy.

“Point,” he says.  “Now, tell me how I can kill these things.”

Sherlock raises another eyebrow.  “You want to kill demons?” he says. 

“It’d be a good idea to learn, yeah?  They are trying to kill us.”  John doesn’t understand why Sherlock seems surprised, but he’ll let it pass.  There’s too much to be done in too little time.  “So, teach me.  They’re not immortal, right?  They can be killed.”

“They can,” Sherlock allows, still looking far too amused and incredulous.  What, he can’t imagine a human who wants to fight them?  “There are many ways, though I don’t have the time to teach them to you.”

“Such as?”  John says, impatient, unyielding.  He’s just as stubborn as Sherlock, when he needs to be. 

“Generally you must exorcise them,” he says.  “That’s a process that takes time, and since you are not an angel, you are bound by ritual. However, some good _defenses_ against them include salt and silver, holy water,  holy fire, prayer, and Latin.”

“Thank God I know Latin,” John says.

Sherlock laughs.  “Yes.  _Christo_ will reveal a demon to you.  They can’t hear it without flinching.  Praying in Latin hurts them.  It also helps if you call out their true name.”

“How do you find that out?”

“You don’t,” Sherlock says dryly.  “Just pray, mostly. Lestrade will be by later with silver bullets and salt for you.  I have placed sigils on you.”

“Sigils,” John says, still unsure.

“Your kind might call them spells,” Sherlock explains.  “They are not magic, but they do have power.  Give me your arm.”

John does without thinking, and Sherlock pushes back his sleeve. He taps John’s forearm, finger warm against his pulse.  At once, faint lines appear, weaving into complex symbols.  John probably should yell, should panic, but he’s _fascinated._

“These are sigils?” he asks. 

Sherlock nods.  “Wards of protection.  They’re passive, so you can’t activate them, but they will keep you safe from searchers, persuasion, and anything short of a full-on attack.”

“Huh,” John says, rolling down his sleeve again.  “So no one can spy on me from a distance?  Track me, that sort of thing?”

“I can,” Sherlock says.  “No one else.”

John nods.  He feels better, now that he knows he can defend himself.  “Lestrade knows where we are?”

A sour look crosses Sherlock’s face, tinged with amusement.  “We have a deal,” he says. “He lets me do what I want, what I need to do, and I tell him where I am.”

“He’s your babysitter,” John says, a grin breaking across his face.  “He’s your _nanny._ ”

“Concerned party,” the taller man snaps. 

John laughs.  “ _Nanny,_ ” he crows, delighted.  “I’m going to have to buy him a pint.  What did he threaten you with, to get you to agree to that?”

Sherlock is smiling too now, a little ruefully.  “He threatened to tar and feather me,” he says. “Which is actually possible.”

John grins.  “Maybe two pints,” he says.

“Do not indulge him,” Sherlock rumbles, sitting down, legs tucked underneath him.  “He gets ideas, and he’s too old to keep up with me anymore.”

“Noted,” John says, still laughing.  His grin fades as he looks around, taking stock of the hotel room.  It’s bland and peeling, more than a little sad.  Sigils are painted into the wall, wet and dripping.  Sherlock has salt lining the whole room and pentagrams painted on the ceiling and floors.

“The staff is gonna kill you for these,” he says, examining the pentagrams.

“They’re necessary,” Sherlock says.  “Devil’s traps.  They catch demons, and hold them.”

John nods.  “Teach me how to draw them,” he says.  “These devil’s traps, the sigils.  I want to learn.”

Sherlock tilts his head, considering.  “I can do that,” he says.  “Come here.”

They spend the next few hours drawing sigils over and over again on pieces of paper, until John can do it and do it _well._

“Satisfactory,” Sherlock says, looking over the last devil’s trap.  “Wherever you stay, wherever you sleep, draw these.  They will protect you.” 

John nods seriously, looking over his work.  He’s proud of himself.  Considering the fact that two days ago, he thought that angels and demons were just fairytales and now he’s warding himself against them, preparing to kill anything that comes in through the door.

He’s tired, though.

“Is that a side effect?” he asks sleepily.  “Of flying around, I mean.”

“It’s an effect of the healing,” Sherlock rumbles, still awake.  “You’ll be tired for a few days while your body adjusts.”

“What did you do to me?”  he thinks of the handprint on his chest, itching and new. The thing below his breastbone kicks, alive and warm. 

Sherlock laughs.  “Nothing at all,” he says. 

Somehow, John doesn’t really believe him.

\-----

He wakes up to the sound of the door coming in, and fire roars up and the salt line sparks, and Sherlock has his arm around John and the other outstretched protectively before the human is even fully awake.

Jim Moriarty stands in the door, his teeth—fucking _teeth,_ holy shit those are actually legitimate fangs—bared in a grin. 

“Well well well,” he sings.  He tries to step forward into the room, but the salt flashes and the sigils on the wall glow.  He can’t seem to get in, and he bares his teeth at Sherlock.  “Cowardly little brother,” he says chidingly.  “Why don’t you come out here and fight me like an angel?  All this running and hiding is really _so_ terribly mundane.”

Sherlock says nothing, his hand outstretched.  The room feels too hot, dry as tinder, and sparks flicker in his hair. 

Moriarty laughs, and his eyes flash yellow.  “Fine, then.  Just sit there with your little pet.  You’re safe in here for now.  I promise I won’t hurt you, not today.  You’ve earned it, I admit.  I didn’t think you had that much left in you, to take out my lieutenants _and_ heal the meat sack.”

 _Meat sack?_ John bristles, but an instinctive fear of something this inhuman, sharp-toothed and yellow-eyed, keeps him from starting forward.  Moriarty’s eyes gleam, an invitation. 

“Come to me,” he says, sounding warm and Jim-from-IT genuine.  There’s a trace of _something_ in his voice, lazy and calm, and John can’t help but lean into it.  He feels a power lock his spine, straightening his legs.  “I won’t hurt you, little human.”

 _It’s a lie,_ John’s brain chants, _it’s a lie, it’s a lie,_ but he can’t help but want to move towards him, to meet the demon at the door and break the salt line so he could come in, and they would all burn together—

“John,” Sherlock rumbles, laying the hand not outstretched on his shirt, right over the handprint.  It’s a solid weight, and enough to send sparks tearing down his spine and to break Moriarty’s voice.  John falls back into himself and realizes that he is standing, one foot already on the way to the demon’s side.

Moriarty snarls at Sherlock.  “You really should take better care of your things,” he growls.  “Someone might take and break them.”

John meets Moriarty’s gaze steadily.  The muzzle of his gun juts out from the edge of the bed, and slowly, carefully, he draws it closer.

“Leave him alone,” Sherlock hisses.  The bone-dry power in the room swells, doubling and redoubling until the walls swell with it, creaking like trees in a summer storm. 

“Is it nice, having one?”

“Having what?” John says, still drawing his gun out. 

The demon rolls his eyes, bouncing on the balls of his feet.  “Seriously,” he says, addressing Sherlock, “how do you _stand_ it?  The questions, the predictability, the _please, Daddy, look at me, look at me!_ Absolutely _dull,_ is what it is.  I thought better of you, Bahram.  There was a time when you wouldn’t even look at this little planet, let alone _live_ on it.”

“I could say the same for you,” Sherlock says neutrally.  John inches his gun closer, still trying to puzzle out Moriarty’s earlier statement.  With a sick jolt, he realizes that the demon was talking about _him_ like he’s some kind of unintelligent animal.  “And here we are.”

Moriarty snorts.  “Took me long enough to find you,” he hums.  “Really, when you left upstairs _everyone_ thought you were on a one-way track to my town.  Gave us quite a shock when you didn’t show up.  I mean, I can understand a few centuries of sniffing around, but _six thousand years_?  My, my, Bahram dearest.  It’s almost like you _like_ the little insects.”

“I would never go to _your town,_ ” Sherlock says, disdain in every line of his body.  John almost has his gun near enough now.  “I still remember where I came from.”

Moriarty rolls his eyes.  “Even Rigel sets sometime.  Besides, you’ve never been the model for angelic behavior, little bro.  Always disobeying, running around and _experimenting_ when you were supposed to stand and fight.”

“At least I didn’t abandon my home,” Sherlock points out.  “I never betrayed my brothers.”

“Came close enough,” Moriarty snorts.  “What’re you doing now, precious?  Running around like you’re one of _them._  Pretending to be a little consulting de-tec-tive, making friends with meat sacks, rubbing elbows with dirt-people.  Don’t you know you’re better than them, cherub?  That you’re not ordinary, like they are?”

Sherlock says nothing.  John doesn’t dare bend and grab his gun, not yet.  Moriarty so far has done nothing other than bounce around on the balls of his feet and mock them.  He hasn’t attacked or threatened, even.  John doesn’t want to ruin that now. 

Moriarty bares his sharp, sharp teeth.  _Demon._ “Or perhaps you _are_ ordinary.  Maybe you’re not the hero of this story.  Pity, pity.  It was shaping up to be such a lovely fairytale, too.”

“What do you mean?” Sherlock says warily.

Moriarty _tsks._ “You like stories so much,” he says.  “Puzzles, games.  Anything strange or abnormal to satisfy your higher brain, to stop the boredom, for a little while.  You’re the hero, _he’s_ the sidekick, and I’m the villain.  Duh.”  He grins, his eyes flickering yellow.  “Every fairytale needs a good old fashioned villain.”

“I didn’t come to earth to fight with you,” Sherlock snaps.

Moriarty nods.  “But we’re going to fight anyway.  You betrayed me, little brother.  You didn’t come with me, and you let them cast me down.”  Anger darkens the smaller man’s face, makes his fingers into long, sharp claws.  The smell of burning fills the air.  “You _abandoned me!_ I _FELL_ because of you!”

“No,” says Sherlock, quietly.  “You fell because you chose to.”

“Chose to,” Moriarty snarls in a voice suddenly octaves deeper, a gravel-spit growl that makes every muscle in John’s body ache for flight.   

“Chose,” Sherlock says firmly, still with his hand raised and outstretched, firelight kindling there.  John just needs a distraction now, a split second window.

“You think there’s a choice,” snarls the demon, taking a threatening step forward.  The menace in the air sings like a knife, and the sigils on the walls glow molten. 

John ducks, the gun in his steady hands before he has time to weigh his choices.  He doesn’t think.  He just fires, and the bullet sings for Moriarty’s for head.

It doesn’t make it there.

“Come now,” Moriarty says, turning all that bright, terrible focus towards John.  Needles slide across the surface of his skin, seeking a purchase.  He feels like he’s being circled by wolves.  “You can’t really think that would work.”

He holds the bullet between two fingers, turning it over carelessly.  His fingertips sizzle and blacken—silver bullet—but he doesn’t let go.  “Silver.  How cute.” 

“Leave him alone,” Sherlock rumbles.

Moriarty grins. “Why should I?  You brought him in to this.”  He turns back to John, sizing him up rather like a hawk surveys a field mouse.  “Tell me, John Watson, did Bahram dearest tell you what you’re getting in to? Angels and demons _look_ like fun on paper, but trust me, sweetheart, we’re really, really _not.”_

Behind Moriarty, the shadow of wings ripples across the wall, just a flash of ragged, tattered feather.  John’s stomach lurches.  What kind of demon has wings?

 _A fallen angel,_ he thinks, rubbing the handprint scar instinctively.  Sherlock sends him a look, worry in his pale eyes, and the burn seems cool against the rest of him, laid right on top of his heart.  He calms, and focuses on the demon again. 

“Tell you what,” Moriarty sings, bouncing on the balls of his feet again.  He lets go of the bullet, and it rolls on to their side of the salt line.  “I’ll make you a deal, Bahram.  You and your little pet can live, uninterrupted, even, if you can solve this riddle.”

“I don’t make deals with fallen angels,” Sherlock rumbles.

Moriarty smiles.  “It’s cute that you think you have a choice in the matter,” he says.  “Think it through, darling.  If you agree, and can solve my little problem _before_ my people tear you apart, I’ll let you go.”

“If I don’t?

“He’ll kill us,” John murmurs.

“Got it in one!  You can’t outrun me forever, you know.  You’re weak, little brother.  You’ve spent too much time as a meat sack.  There’s only so many places on this planet you can go with a human in tow, and I will find you.  You can run and run as long as you like, but I _will_ find you.”

A promise gleams in the man’s yellow eyes, vicious and old as a star. 

Sherlock blinks, looks at John.

“Very well,” he says lowly, anger in his broad shoulders.  John wonders, not for the first time, what his wings look like flared and angry.  “What’s your riddle, Sammael?”

The demon hums, pleased.  To John he says, “Do you know what angels are made of, dirt-crawler?”

John blinks.  He thinks that breaking eye contact might be a bad idea, and wonders if shooting Moriarty again will do anything.  Probably not. 

“We are fire,” says the demon.  “We _burn.”_

(John remembers a bomb on his chest, fear and anger and worry roaring in his ears, and Sherlock in front of him with his arms held out, and Moriarty with teeth that were a little _too_ sharp to be human. 

“I will burn the heart of out of you,” he had said then, snarled it, hands in claws but no, that wasn’t possible, that was just John Watson, brain dull with shock. 

It makes more sense now.  Moriarty could actually _burn._ )

“But even the brightest fire likes the coolness of water, sometimes,” he continues, rolling his shoulders.  The shadow of wings disappears.  He turns to Sherlock.  “Even a star craves the water, a little death to soothe our burning hearts.  Can you tell me, _Mr. Holmes_ , where it is that water burns?  Where does the water run into flame, and the flame to solid stone?  I’ll be there for you, if you can find it.  Who knows?  You might even save yourself.”

“That’s it?”  John says, disbelieving.  “That’s it?  That’s not fair, that’s—”

“Ta,” Moriarty says, teeth bared, and he’s gone in the rush of feathers and clacking bone.  The sigils fade back into ink on the wall, and the salt line settles again.   

Sherlock, gradually, relaxes, and John feels something warm and heavy brush against his back.  “We must go,” he says, voice thunder in the small room.  He turns sharply and paces, around and around.  “We can’t stay here.”

  1. “He’ll send his hordes after us, even if we solve his little puzzle.”



“Do you have any ideas?”

“Where are we going?”

“To France, for now.  Germany after.”

“I don’t speak French or German,” John points out, reaching to take Sherlock’s hand anyway.  When their fingers brush, the scar seems to pulse like it has a heartbeat of its own. 

“You will,” Sherlock says, and the shadow of wide, enormous wings comes across the wall. John wishes he could see the real thing, but doesn’t know how to ask.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he says instead, aiming for joking, but Sherlock’s reply is lost in the roar of wind, and they’re gone again, chasing shadows. 

  _  
_

v.

Germany agrees with John, once he gets over the whole we-flew-here-in- _twenty-seconds_ thing.  The air is clean and strong and he isn’t afraid, not here. 

Sherlock gets them to a hotel and promptly collapses on the bed, a sigh shuddering through him.  He doesn’t move to take off his coat or his boots, but by the deep, even rise and fall of his chest, he’s not going to.

He’s asleep.

John, very, very carefully, pulls off his boots, then wiggles the taller man out of his coat.  Sherlock doesn’t even stir.

 _He must be tired._ John wonders how much energy it takes, literally lifting someone and flying with them halfway across the continent.  It happened so fast, it couldn’t have been more than five seconds’ time in between France and Germany. 

John sighs, peeling off his own stiff, sticky clothes and padding to the shower.  He aches in new and exciting places and he really wants nothing more to sleep, but Sherlock’s sleeping already.  They both shouldn’t sleep.  It’s dangerous.  So he’ll let Sherlock sleep for now and he’ll keep watch, and in the morning they can switch. 

He takes a quick, cold shower.  It feels better than it should.  Dried blood flakes off his shoulders, swirls a rusty red down the drain.  The last traces of a demon slip away with the water, and he feels lighter for it.  (They met a pair of strong ones in France, and that was a fight.  Sherlock slew one with his bare hands and light.  John emptied a clip of silver into another one, firing over and over again until Sherlock came and with a word cast the demon out.)

After, the hotel is quiet.  Upstairs there’s the creak of heavy footsteps, loud, drunken laughter.  A murmur of voices, hardly more than a whisper.  But there’s no screaming, no threatening hum.  No sudden, sharp silence that marks a death, no creeping hiss of sulfur.

John grabs a shotgun, loading it with silver bullets and settling by the door.  Sherlock doesn’t even stir as he goes past, his breathing slow, deep, even.  Angels, apparently, need to sleep.  It’s interesting, really, how much about them is wrong.  In what John’s seen these last few days, nothing matches up with what he’s been told, with the vague stories of his childhood.  There are no fluffy white wings, no chubby cheeks, no bow and arrow aimed to spread love. 

It’s strange. 

But his life is very strange.  He figures that if he can live with a man who keeps body parts in the fridge for complex scientific studies but sometimes forgets to dress himself in the morning, he can get used to this.  Running, after all, isn’t so bad.  He has Sherlock, he has a gun, he knows what to do now, if something tries to hurt him.

The hours pass.  He’s tired, but he’s been more tired.  Sherlock doesn’t stir.  He looks like he’s dead, spread-eagled on the matress like he’s fallen from a great height, but his breathing is steady and soft, his ribs rising and falling. 

Angels breathe.  Or humans breathe, and the angel inside needs to breathe too.  Or Sherlock’s been in a human body for so long that he’s just being human, as close as he can. 

So strange. 

But all of it makes sense now, the emotionlessness, the coldness, the distance.  The inhuman precision, the fascination with things most people would consider repulsive, immoral.  The warmth, too, and the passion.  Sherlock makes sense. 

The rest of it, though, doesn’t.  Moriarty isn’t a demon, Sherlock said.  He was an angel too, a powerful one, one who sat at the pearly gates himself, in a place of the highest honor.  If this was true (and Sherlock had no reason to lie), then why was he hunting down another angel?  Why was he using demons to do it?  It doesn’t make sense. 

Thinking of these things makes his head hurt.  John Watson’s no idiot, but he’s never been a particularly religious man and he’s no philosopher.  Angels and demons are just a bit out of his league. 

All except this one, it seems. 

As odd as it is, he is comfortable with the angel living in Sherlock’s body.  He can’t help but trust him.  He’s always trusted him, if he’s being honest, and just because Sherlock suddenly happens to be several thousand years old, winged, and occasionally on fire doesn’t mean that he’s not the same creature who keeps body parts in the fridge and deduces professions by a man’s thumb, who is too lazy to get his own tea but will happily walk all the way to Liverpool if it means he’s not _bored._

Really, nothing’s changed.  The nature of the game, as Moriarty called it, is the same, it’s just played by different characters now.  There’s a bit more in it. 

But they’re still Sherlock and Moriarty.  He’s still John Watson. 

They are the same. 

Shaking his head slightly, John perches at the end of the other bed.  Sherlock breathes slowly, deep and even.  He twitches as the bedsprings creak, but he doesn’t wake.  Good.  He needs his sleep. 

John watches the door.  It doesn’t open all night long.

\-----

When he opens his eyes again, he’s not in the hotel, he’s lying on some grassy field with the wind in his face and the sounds of a creek bubbling past his head.

His first instinct is to panic and find a gun, but it’s a muted, far-away feeling.  He is safe here, he can just tell, and feathers brush his cheek.

 _Dream?_ he wonders.

But no, it’s not a dream.  He knows that too.  It’s too vivid for a dream.  Rocks dig into his back.  His feet itch where the grass has slipped between his shoes. 

Sunlight warms him up slowly and he stretches, rolling the tension out of his stiff legs.  The feathers on his face disappear with a faint whoosh, and finally he blinks his eyes open.

“Good morning,” he says, because Sherlock is perched next to his head, knees pulled to his chest, watching John intently. 

Sherlock makes an annoyed sound, and looks away.  They’re in a clearing of sorts, the trees towering over them protectively.  Clear, fresh water sings past, and somewhere a bird is singing. 

“Where are we?”

“Germany still,” Sherlock answers, voice rough.  He sounds like he’s just woken up too. 

“How did we get here?”

“I flew us.”

“And I slept through it,” John mutters, unsteadily climbing to his feet and shaking off bits of grass.  “Wonderful.  Why are we here, exactly, and not in our hotel?”

“It’s not safe,” Sherlock says promptly, though he doesn’t stand.  “We shouldn’t stay in more than one place for long.”

“You really think Moriarty can find us that quickly?”

A withering look.  “I know he can.  I could.”

John sighs and decided not to aruge.  “Did you bring the guns, at least?”

The detective snorts, flicking a hand over to the shadow of a tall pine.  John’s things, guns included, lie piled beneath it.

“Thank you.”

Sherlock remains completely still in the middle of the clearing as John does another check-up on his guns, searching for any flaw or imperfection that could get them killed if more demons show up. 

Sherlock said the other night that it wasn’t likely, that even Moriarty couldn’t just sacrifice demons left and right, but still, better to be prepared.

After that’s done, John turns to his flatmate with an eyebrow raised.  “Breakfast?” 

The angel snorts and doesn’t move. 

Typical. 

“Do you even need to eat?”  John asks, five minutes later with his mouth full of the tasteless ration bars he picked up in France. 

“No.”

“But I’ve seen you do it.”  Very rarely, of course, but Sherlock hasn’t eaten, and he likes tea. 

“A bad habit,” Sherlock mutters.  He moves for the first time that morning, standing carefully.  “I don’t need to eat but sometimes it is difficult to block out the human’s impulses.”

Impulses, how lovely.  One of life’s great joys reduced to a biological imperative.  John sighs and spits out his ration bar. 

“What do you do for fun, then?  If you don’t need to eat, do you need to sleep?”

“Yes.  Even angels sleep.” 

“Huh,” John says. 

Sherlock arches an eyebrow.  “Perhaps this line of questioning is better suited for another time.”

“Why not now?”

“We’re moving again,” Sherlock says immediately, pacing. 

“What, now?”

“Yes, now.  I just told you that Moriarty could find us,” he says impatiently. 

“Lovely,” John grumbles, but he grabs a rifle and slings his pack over his shoulder anyway.  “You owe me for all this jumping around, you know.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Sherlock mutters, but he’s smiling, just a little.  He reaches out, offering John his hand. 

John takes it.  There’s that rush of warmth, that spark, and his heart kicks for just a second before light grows and they’re flying again. 

Sherlock goes at a slower pace this time, not rushing around like he did yesterday.  John hangs in his grip and it’s not so much like being tied to a shooting star as it is to a very fast, very ill-behaved horse.  The ride is not smooth— “jet streams,” Sherlock says, by way of explaination—and by the end John’s head is pounding and he’s feeling rather green around the edges, but it’s worth it.

 _It’s worth it._ How many people can say that they have flown with an angel?  How many people can say that in a day they went from the edges of Germany all the way to Berlin, who listened to wings rushing overhead and a strong, steady heartbeat? 

They touch down and Sherlock doesn’t let go so quickly this time.  He lets John gain his feet again, and together they make their way stiffly to another run-down hotel. 

Their shoulders brush, and the air feels charged.

If he’s being honest, John has always known that Sherlock is special.  He’s always felt that there’s something more to the man, something bright and white-hot.  He never expected _this,_ but he knew. 

He knew, and it’s warm.  It’s a light, and he can’t help but let himself be drawn in, orbiting Sherlock like the planets he knows so little about.

This is, he thinks, what it’s like to be in love. 

It sounds like something out of a bad teen romance novel, it really does.  An ordinary person finds out that their best friend is an angel, sent to protect them.  They fight demons.  They fall in love.  They run away together and defeat those demons, and live happily ever after.

 _But our story’s not finished yet,_ warns a little voice in his head.  _Not even by half._

John shakes off that ominous thought and follows Sherlock into the hotel. 

There’s only one bed this time, and John hesitates.  “You take it,” he says.  “You’ve done all the heavy lifting today, you deserve it.”

Sherlock grunts, curls his fingers around John’s wrist.  Then he collapses, falling face-first into the bed and taking John down with him. 

The bed is hard, but not unpleasant, and Sherlock is very, very warm. 

“Sherlock,” John says thickly,  blinking slowly, tiredly.  “Sherlock, you’ve got to let me up.”

Sherlock doesn’t hear him.  He’s already asleep, and there must be some angel magic at work or something, because John is going, he’s going, he’s gone—

\-----

He wakes up to snarling.

Deep, furious, terrifying growls that shake their room’s thin walls, and Sherlock is awake and bristling in an instant, John blindly reaches for his shotgun.

“What is that?”  he hisses.  He’s gone from dead asleep to hyperaware in less than two seconds.  His heart stutters in his chest.  Sherlock is a warm, furious presence at his side. 

The snarling comes closer.  The windows rattle, shaking with the force of it.

Sherlock holds very still.  “Hellhounds,” he mutters, lips barely moving.  “They’ve been sent to collect us.”

 _Collect us._ That doesn’t sound threatening at all.

“Moriarty?” 

“ _Yes._ ”

John follows his friend’s lead, holding so still it almost hurts.  The snarling seems to pass by, fading out, and the windows stop shaking. 

“We have to go,” Sherlock says.  “Right now.” 

“ _Right_ now?”  And yeah, he can see that, he doesn’t know exactly what a hellhound is but he can guess, and he’d really rather not stick around to find out if his hunch is right.  “Alright, fine, just let me gather everything—”

“ _Now,_ John,” Sherlock says, and there’s a note in his voice that John’s never heard before, and it terrifies him—

Sherlock grabs him by the wrist at the exact same second as something large and angry crashes through the window.  John can’t see it, he can only hear it, but whatever it is it sounds _huge,_ its snarls so deep they shake him to his bones, and there’s the scrabble of claws on the floor—

Sherlock shouts something that makes the air blister, and the thing yelps, blown back. 

“Let’s go,” Sherlock says, and he drags John from the bed into the gaping window.  They climb out into the night. 

“Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, _fly away?_ ” John hisses. 

Sherlock, pale in the moonlight, shakes his head.  “That gives me away,” he says.  “If Sammael—Moriarty—has turned out the hellhounds, he’ll be watching the skies.  We have to go on foot.”

Together, they plunge into the darkness.  Sherlock seems to know where he’s going, following streets with precise, frantic energy.  John just follows, rifle clenched tightly.  He made sure to load it with silver bullets, just in case.

He hopes it’s enough. 

\-----

It isn’t. 

They manage to hide in the shadows of buildings for a few hours, always moving.  They never stay in one place for longer than fifteen minutes.

Every now and then, John will hear a growl sliding past, and Sherlock will pull him deeper into the shadows. 

“Why can’t I see them?”  John whispers.  He can hear them well enough, all snarl and clicking claws. 

“Because they are hunting me, and me alone,” Sherlock says.  “When they hunt for you, you will see them, but not before.”

John shudders.  That is suitably terrifying, but Sherlock seems to know what he’s doing, and he has a gun full of silver bullets.

“Silver will kill them, right?”

“Silver will kill most supernatural things, yes,” Sherlock murmurs.  “The trick isn’t killing one.  The trick is surviving the pack.”

John nods, peering out into the darkness.

“Come on,” Sherlock says.  “We need to keep moving.” 

John doesn’t know what he sees, out there in the dark.  He doesn’t know what signs Sherlock’s reading in all of this, what clues he’s putting together.  They seem to be moving randomly from place to place, city to city, but it’s never random with Sherlock, is it?  They’re going with purpose.  Sherlock is getting closer and closer to Moriarty’s riddle. 

They slip through alleys and crowded streets, keeping their ears open for any snarling.  John doesn’t know how the hounds are tracking them—scent?  Aura?—but he knows that they are, and they can’t be far behind.  No city is big enough for demons, it seems. 

They end up in the red light district, weaving through crowds of grasping hands and slick skin while crumbling statues perch on the buildings overhead, angels in the architecture watching over them sadly. 

John gets an idea.  “Sherlock,” he says, pointing up.  “If we can get up there, can they follow?”

Sherlock shakes his head.  “Hellhounds don’t have wings.  They could climb the staircase, but they couldn’t fly to us.”

“So let’s go,” John says, taking the lead.  He elbows aside the mass of humanity, and then Sherlock is running beside him and he doesn’t have to fight his way through, everything just seems to part for them.

The world takes on a distorted quality, vivid, too bright.  Everything seems to slide past to slow, in painful clarity, and voices are muffled and dim. 

It’s like there’s a barrier between John and Sherlock and the rest of the world.  They are a plane apart, seeing but not touching. No one seems to notice them.

 _Is this what it’s like for him all the time?_ he wonders.  _Slowed down, separate?_

He doesn’t have time to think of much else.  Behind them, loud and clear, comes a hellhound’s growl, and the crowds part again, forced aside by something huge.

“Faster,” Sherlock urges, and he bounds up a set of creaking stairs, rust cracking under his feet.  John follows.

So do the hellhounds, shouldering their way through the crowd.  John can’t see them but he can _feel_ them, their heat, the weight of them as they mount the stairs and tear up after the pair, claws scattering sparks.

Sherlock looks back and John swears, pushing him on.  He knows that you don’t look back, in a battlefield.  You don’t ever look back. You keep your eyes forward, watching what’s coming.  Your instincts will take care of your back.  Your eyes, not so much. 

“Almost there,” he says.  “Keep your eyes on that statue, we can get to it, we can hide—”

“Too late,” Sherlock says tightly.  “They’ll call him.  We have to get off here.”

“And you didn’t tell me that _before_ we boxed ourselves in?” John shouts.  He turns and fires at the sparks, and is rewarded with a yelp and the sight of his bullet disappearing.  “ _Damn it!_ We’re trapped!”

He can feel the hounds’ breath now, fiery and reeking of sulfur. 

“You have to fly us out!”

“He’ll see,” Sherlock says.

“He can see us now!”

“Point,” the angel says, and grabs the back of John’s collar.  “Hold on to me.” 

The hounds are close now, the iron staircase buckling under the weight of them, sparks showering below. 

Sherlock screams a word that makes the iron twist and leaps, dragging them up—

For just a second, John sees a flash of ugly yellow eyes, fangs as long as his forearm, and teeth close around his ankle. 

Fire explodes behind his eyes and he screams.  Sherlock howls and the hound falls away, and then they’re flying, faster than John can remember going before.  It only takes a second to get away, to a place where the shadows are long and deep and the angels overhead have chipped, battered wings.

Not that John can see where he is.  The world has gone fuzzy and gray, and the lights—stars, Sherlock—are too bright.  He whimpers.  “What’s happening?” he gasps.

“You were bitten,” Sherlock says, a note of something undefinable—or perhaps just something John’s never heard from him before—in his voice.  “Hellhounds are venomous.”

“Heal me,” John says thickly.  His words tunnel away from him—he can’t tell if he said what he meant to at all.

“I can’t,” Sherlock whispers.  “They will see.”

“Am I dying?”

“No,” the taller man says, ferociously.  “You won’t die.  You can survive it until dawn, John.  It’s only a few hours off, I can heal you then, when they stop hunting.  You can make it.”

“Okay,” John says.  He trusts Sherlock.  A fever breaks out behind his eyelids, crawling towards his chest.  Everything hurts, and his bones are melting inside his skin.

“John,” Sherlock says. He presses a hand to John’s chest, right above the handprint.  The only thing separating them is a layer of cloth.  “You will not die.”

Right below his breastbone, something flutters inside of him.  The handprint—the _mark,_ Moriarty called it, the thing that make Sherlock’s eyes glow with pride—itches.

“Yes,” he says, conviction—faith—in him now.  “I won’t die.” 

“Good,” Sherlock murmurs.  “Stay awake, John.  All you have to do is stay awake.”

\-----

The second time he saw an angel, John was thirty-five and on his second tour, and Afghanistan was a wilder place than he’d left it.  He had seen too much death by then. He had become hardened to it, and was used to stitching up young men while bullets sang around him.

So maybe he wasn’t as careful as he should have been.  Maybe he was too quick to jump into the line of fire for his mates, maybe he was too fierce, too much. 

But he was a good soldier, and a better doctor.  (That distinction was an important one.  He treasured it fiercely.)

He was out in the hot sand, tending to a fallen brother, when he saw the bullet.  It was fired from far off, probably not meant for him at all, but he saw it, and soldiers had a _thing_ about seeing a bullet coming.  If you saw a bullet like that, sleek and shining and brighter than the rest, it was your bullet.  It was your Grim Reaper, it was your death, and it was coming for you and nothing would ever stop it.

John saw his bullet, that day in Afghanistan.  He saw it, and then he saw something stop it.  That something was tall and brighter than the sun, and it stood in front of him, wing outstretched, and just barely grazed that bullet.

It was enough.  The bullet went through his shoulder instead of his heart. His mates dragged him off that burning sand, and he got a bad shoulder, PTSD, and a fever that stuck with him for months, but he lived to make it back home.

Six months later, he met Sherlock Holmes.

\-----

“Talk to me,” John slurs, after Sherlock wakes him up for the third time.  Everything is dark and too hot, except, strangely, Sherlock.  For once he is cool and steady, and John lets himself lean up against him, fever dancing behind his eyes.

He wants to sleep again. 

“Talk to me, keep me awake.”

“What do you want me to say?” Sherlock asks.  His hand is cool against the back of John’s neck, but it’s not cool enough.  Heat melts him from the inside out.

“Everything,” John says.  “Anything.  Tell me about the angels.  Where do you come from?”

Sherlock is silent for a long moment, his thumb absently rubbing patterns on John’s skin.  Then, “The first angel, Michael, came from the first star.  He was born from the dust left behind our Father’s hand, and shed the first light into the universe.  Our Father saw that Michael was good, and named him and kept him at his side.

“For a time, it was only Michael alone, and he grew to crave companions, shining stars like himself who could help him hold back the dark because he was just one and the universe was large and full of darkness.

“Father agreed, and created another, brighter star, the brightest of all, the one you call Sirius.  From it came Lucifer, the best-loved, and Michael was no longer alone.  Time was not yet a construct, but they eventually pleaded Father for more of us, and so He created more stars, and each star bore angels.”

Sherlock pauses, licking his lips.  “We were all born.  Gabriel, Raphael, Hannael, Izrael and his star-brother Azrael, Serafina, Annael, Castiel, Urael.  Sammael and myself.  For thousands of years, we were allowed to wander the universe, doing with it what we pleased.  We created worlds for our Father, and shed our light on them.

“And then, everything changed.”

“Why?”  John asks sleepily.  He can see it, the angels in the vastness of the universe, behind his eyelids burning with the fever. 

“Father created you.”  There is only a slight note of bitterness in Sherlock’s voice, only a blip, a wavering uncertainty.  “He created humans, and all of us were suddenly pinned in place, trapped in your sky, forbidden to stray.  We were to light your way, and that was it.  We were to serve no other purpose.  All our years of creation, of being gods ourselves, were at an end.  Angels, gods of our own worlds, became your hope, your light.  Banishing the dark for you, and only you.”

“Most of us didn’t mind, originally.  We are beings created for worship.  We were happy to serve your fledgling race.”

“But Lucifer wasn’t,” John murmurs.  He knows this part of the story; everyone knows this part of the story. 

A bitter, twisting smile.  “No.  He was not. He thought that we were the superior beings, that you should serve us.  Angels are born of the stars, he said.  We carry starfire in our wings and light to the dark and hollow places.  What are humans born of?  Dirt, he said.  Dust that clogs our feathers and clouds the light.  He said that humans would betray us, given long enough.  Father would not listen.

“Lucifer and a third of my brothers and sisters rebelled.  We fought them in the sky, killed them where we could and cast them down where we could not.  After that, we were changed.  Those who had fallen created hell for themselves, and started stealing human souls. Those who remained were stars no longer.  We were soldiers, forced to fight against our brothers and sisters.  Sammael and I are of the same star, you know.  We were born together, but he followed Lucifer and I remained behind.  We fought each other more times than I can remember.”

“But then you left,” John says.

“Yes,” says Sherlock.  “I did.  It was my choice.  If Father gave your kind the ability to choose their fate, then He gave it to angels as well.  I left, as have many others over the years.  Some still remain, but it’s mostly humans who fight our war now.”

“What did you do?” John asks.  He doesn’t want to think about Sherlock, forced to fight his own siblings.  He can’t imagine fighting Harry.  Can’t imagine her betraying her family like that. 

“I lived,” Sherlock says.  “I took hosts.  I was a king, then a philosopher, a beggar, a scholar, a soldier, a farmer, a merchant.  I spent nearly a century as a monk in the mountains, then another as a doctor and a writer of stories.”

“Did you like it?”

“It is different,” Sherlock rumbles.  “Angels do not feel the things a human can.  Every life I lived was new to me.”

John senses a story there, and he wants to hear it, but he’s tired, he’s so tired.  Some of the darkness is fading, and the fever burns inside him. 

Sherlock sighs.  “Sleep now,” he says.  “Dawn is coming.  You’ll be alright when it comes.”

John wants to protest. He wants to hear more of these stories. He wants to know what it’s like to create a world, what it’s like to be a star.  He wants to know why Sherlock chose earth as his sanctuary, when he could have gone anywhere he wanted in the universe.

He wants to know, and he knows that tomorrow he won’t remember any of his questions.

But Sherlock is cool, and he’s so hot, he’s so hot, he’s falling through a web of fire—

\-----

When John wakes the fourth time, it’s to a dimmed fire and coolness spreading through his veins.  Dawn has banished the long, deep shadows, and Sherlock is crouched at his ankle, whispering the words for healing.

As the poison leaves him, John sits up and licks his cracked lips, blinking blearily.  The memory of last night—running and fire and Sherlock’s hand on his neck, his voice in his ear—is dim and blurred.  “What happened?” 

“You’re going to live,” Sherlock says tightly.  He’s holding himself stiffly, like he’s in pain.  “The hounds won’t be able to run again until dusk.  I suggest we use that time to get out of here.”

“Where are we going?” John asks, standing cautiously.  He puts his weight on his ankle and it doesn’t give out—good. 

Sherlock gives him a vicious smile.  “To solve Moriarty’s riddle.”

“You’ve solved it?” 

“Yes,” Sherlock says smugly, straightening.  He does so gingerly, but he’s standing so John’s not going to say anything.

“Care to share?”

“Not particularly,” he says, and John rolls his eyes, but goes to Sherlock’s outstretched hand anyways. 

“We’re flying there?”

“Just out of the city,” Sherlock rumbles.  “It won’t take more than a second.”

And it doesn’t.  There’s the rush of feathers and John is in a train station, clutching Sherlock’s coat and swaying at the suddenness of it.  “No more of that,” he says sternly, slightly ill, but he has just run himself ragged round the continent, fought demons, been bitten by a hellhound, and been dragged through the air like he weighs only slightly more than a field mouse. 

Sherlock just shakes his head, amused, and leads the way to their train.  “We’ll be there by early evening,” he says.  “Try to rest.”

John rolls his eyes but sits down anyway.  The train starts off, the rhythm of it soothing.  He leans back to wait. 

 

 

vi.

The train keeps John awake.  He’s pretty sure that Sherlock is sleeping—his sides are moving like he is—and he knows that he should, that he _has_ to, but he just can’t.

So much has happened. 

John sighs and rolls over, trying to get comfortable.  He doesn’t know where they’re going, but the farther away from Moriarty and his pack of monsters, the better. (Not that they’re getting away.  No, wherever they’re going, it’s towards the answer to his little riddle, and the fallen angel will be there, waiting for him.  John knows it.)

He wishes they could fly, though.  There’s something comforting about the idea of being halfway around the world in an instant, even if the lag is something terrible. 

But Sherlock’s hurt.  He won’t say it, but he is.  John can tell. All the running and flying and healing has taken a lot out of him.  He doesn’t have much power left. 

He won’t say anything.  He carries on as though he’s at full strength when neither of them are.  Of course they’re not.  They’ve been run ragged, both of them, forced from place to place with little chance to rest.

Sherlock is insistent that they’ll solve Moriarty’s final little puzzle soon.  They’ll meet up with the devil himself, sooner or later.  _Every fairytale needs a good old-fashioned villain._

But John knows better than to try and turn Sherlock from his course.  He’s well-versed in Sherlock’s particular brand of insanity, and he never backs down from a challenge, no matter the risk.

John sighs, rolling over again. 

“You’re awake,” Sherlock says, an observation.

“So are you,” John counters.

Sherlock hums.  “I am,” he concedes.  “Can’t sleep?”

“Not in the slightest.  I hate trains.”

“My apologies.”  It’s slightly sarcastic, but Sherlock pauses, then says, quietly, “One of them got ahold of a wing.  I don’t have the power required to heal it.”

John blinks.  “Why didn’t you say anything?” 

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Sherlock says.  “It is irrelevant at this point in time. A _hinderance,_ ” and there’s that sneer of disgust, anger turned inwards.

John sits up.  “Let me see,” he says. 

“No.”

“Sherlock, let me see.  I’m a doctor.  I can’t magic it all better, but at least I can make sure you won’t bleed to death.”

“The bleeding has stopped,” Sherlock says shortly.  “There’s nothing to be done.”

“Let me see.”

“I cannot.”

“Why?”  John says, throwing his hands up.  “This whole time you’ve been hiding them from me.  What are you, ashamed of them?”

  1. They are, however, hidden for the time being, and pulling them out might bring unwanted attention.”



“You’re talking about Moriarty.”

“Yes.”

“He can see your wings?”

“If I pull away the sigils hiding them, yes.  He’ll be searching for us harder now, now that we’re close.” 

“Close to what?”  John asks, leaning forward.  Sherlock doesn’t turn from where he’s curled.  Typical.  “Fine then,” John mutters.  “Forget I asked.”

“Go to sleep, John,” Sherlock says, in that slow, deep voice he has sometimes, laced with a trace of power.  “We’ll be there by morning.”

John doesn’t sleep, but he does dream.  Bright dreams, hazy, golden, flecked with feathers and bits of blood. 

Sherlock doesn’t sleep either, but, well.  That’s to be expected.

\-----

The train stops in a little town called Meiringen, Switzerland. 

“What are we doing here?” John asks, stretching his stiff muscles.  His shoulder hurts. 

Sherlock looks equally as stiff and he’s moving like his back pains him.  Wings, even invisible ones, must be heavy.  “This is the end,” he says, satisfaction blooming in his sleepless eyes.  “This is Moriarty’s secet.”

“This?” John looks around.  It’s a cute little town, all storefronts and clean, tidy streets.  Even the pigeons look well-behaved.  “This is Whoville, Sherlock.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”  He takes another look, trying to pick out some black spot or evil-eyed witch sitting on the street corner, but there’s nothing.  “Are you sure this is the right place?” 

“Oh yes,” Sherlock says, already setting off quickly, long legs eating up the distance.  “We’re very close now.”

“Close to what?” John shouts, but Sherlock doesn’t answer.  Of course he doesn’t answer.  He never does. 

John follows.  They leave the cute little town behind them, disappearing among tall, cracked pines. Dusk is settling in, the sun slipping away over the hills. Shadows deepen, and anxiety prickles down his spine.  “Sherlock, are you sure this is a good idea?”

“It’s fine, John,” the angel mutters, still leading the way.  “We’re not far now.”

“You know where we are?”

“Yes.  There’s a waterfall just up this way.  This is where we’ll find our answer, I think.” 

John rolls his eyes, but he follows anyway.  Of course he follows.  They’ve come this far.  There’s no point in losing faith now.  Here’s as good a place as any to find the answer to Moriarty’s little riddle.

 _We are beings of fire,_ he had said.  _Even a star craves the water, a little death to soothe our burning hearts.  Can you tell me, Mr. Holmes, where it is that water burns?_

They go a mile into the forest, then two, then three.  The shadows grow.  Sherlock is warm, though.  He seems to almost give off his own light, a sort of glow, as the stars rise over the east. 

 _Which one is he?_ John wonders, shoving his hands deep into his pockets.  The weight of his rifle is reassuring. 

“Almost there,” Sherlock murmurs, but the distant, gleaming look in his eyes tells John that he’s not talking to him.  Sherlock is in his own world again, and he can’t help but think of that barrier, Sherlock inside and everyone else sluggish and slow on the outside.  Separate.  Too bright. 

Impulsively, John grabs Sherlock’s hand.  The other startles, torn from his thoughts, and he blinks down at their tangled fingers, confusion evident in his face.

“Haven’t you seen this before?” John chides, amused.  Warmth curls below his breastbone, right under the surface of the handprint.  “Humans do it a lot.  It makes us feel stronger.”

“Humans do a lot of useless things like that,” Sherlock murmurs, but he doesn’t pull his hand away.  He is warm, but not overly so.  It feels right.  Not that John would know what that feels like, but it feels like it was before, when they were Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, consulting detective and exasperated tag-a-long.  When the worst they had to worry about was milk in the fridge and rows with chip and pin machines, an odd case here and there and crippling boredom the rest of the time. 

After these last few days, it’s incredibly comforting, and John finds himself smiling. 

Sherlock isn’t smiling, but he’s relaxed.  They’re probably going right into a trap and he’s relaxed like it’s noting, like he’s been doing this all his life.  Them, together. 

 _We can make it out of here,_ John thinks.  He meant what he said, about holding hands.  It does make him feel stronger.  _We can do this._  

Somewhere, deep in the trees, John hears a growl. 

He freezes.

“Sherlock,” he says slowly.  “Did you hear that?”

Whatever Sherlock says next is lost to the furious, too-close howl of a hellhound, and John sees one for the first time—definitely being attacked, then—explode from the line of trees, charging them full tilt.

It is terrifying.  Huge, all scarred, burned black skin—no fur, all that’s been burned away—and shiny pink welts.  Muscle bulges in its shoulders and neck, rippling down its flanks, and its veins are visible and run with white fire.  It has horrible eyes, long claws, and fangs like knives, broken and dripping venom.

And it’s coming right for them.

It’s yellow eyes flash in vicious triumph, teeth bared, streaming fire—

It’s gone in a flash of light, Sherlock’s palm raised and smoking.

“Damn,” John says.

“John,” Sherlock says.  In the woods, there’s another howl, and another, and another.  The hair on the back of his neck rises.

A pack.  There’s a pack of hellhounds. 

“Sherlock,” John returns evenly.  His fingers are steady as he loads his pistol, one silver bullet, two, three.  His rifle is still fully loaded.  “How many?”

“Seven.”

 _Seven._ “I can take out five,” he says.  “The rest are up to you.”

“We have to split up,” Sherlock murmurs.

“What?  No!  That’s what he wants, isn’t it?  Us alone.”  John takes a step forward, ready to restrain Sherlock if he has to.  He tightens his grip on Sherlock’s hand.  “We’re sticking together.  We’re stronger that way.”

“That’ll just get us killed, John,” Sherlock says patiently.  “If we can divide the pack—” another set of terrifying howls, and a flock of ravens takes flight— “then we have a better chance of picking them off.  You know what to do.  They can’t climb.  Get up a tree, the tallest one you can find, and shoot them.  Don’t miss.”

“What about you?” John argues.  “You can’t fly.”

“One wing is still good for something,” Sherlock says. 

“I won’t leave you.”

“ _Go,_ John,” Sherlock says firmly.  “I’ll be fine.  I’ll meet you back here in a half hour.  Good luck.  Be safe.”

“What if you’re trapped?  What if I’m trapped?”

“Summon me.”

“How?”  Frustration and fear bubbles underneath his skin, itching and rolling in waves.  He doesn’t want to let go of Sherlock’s hand, the thought of it makes his skin crawl and his chest ache.  Letting go feels like a surrender, like a betrayal.  He thinks enough betrayal has happened here.

“Write my name,” Sherlock says. 

“Your name?”

“Names are powerful things,” the angel rumbles.  “Write it, carve it, scratch it into the earth, and I will come.  I promise you that.”

John hesitates, but he can hear the hounds now, crashing through the forest.  He lets Sherlock pull himself free.  “Promise,” he says.  “Half an hour, Sherlock!”

Sherlock grins, eyes a wildfire, turns on his heel, and vanishes into the trees.

 _Stupid, crazy, suicidal bastard,_ John thinks, taking off.  _If I die over this…  If you die over this…_

He runs.  Harder and faster than he ever remembers running, even in the desert.  Behind him, growing ever closer, he hears growling barks and the panting of excited dogs.  The hellhounds are coming.

He runs for a good half-mile, the hounds on his heels the whole way.   They’re not trying to kill him, it seems, but just to catch him.  What for?  To drag him back to Moriarty?  What does Moriarty care for stupid, slow, human John Watson? 

 _Bait,_ he thinks, unsettled to his bones.  _He wants to use me for bait._

Finally, he spots a tree and jumps, throwing his whole weight into it.  He gouges his palms on the rough bark and he feels the snap of teeth just behind his foot, but he manages to get himself up high out of reach, arms burning with the force of his climb.

The hellhounds circle, fire in their eyes.  All of them are hideous, and they glare up at him with ropes of drool and venom hanging from their jaws.

There’s four of them.  (Three for Sherlock, then.)  They’re great, determined things, snapping and leaping at him, but their teeth catch only empty air. Do they plan to keep him here, tree him like some kind of small animal? 

John breathes, forcing calm through his veins, and brings his gun to bear. Not fucking likely. 

He fires.  A hound falls in midleap, fur blistering.  He fires.  Another crashes to the ground, a useless lump of fire and fur.  He fires.  The third drops with a yelp, yellow eyes going blank.  He drops his pistol and goes for his shotgun.  He fires.  The last hellhound twitches and whimpers, limbs jerking.

It too is still.

He waits for a good quarter hour in that tree, every muscle tense, expecting more hounds to come crashing through the undergrowth, but none do.

With that done, he swings himself down, skirting the dissolving bodies, and sets off back towards the place he left Sherlock.

 _Not so easy, was it, Moriarty?_ He thinks, viciously triumphant.  _Did you underestimate us, thinking yourself a god?_

He gets to the spot in about ten minutes, but Sherlock isn’t back yet.

John waits.

And waits. 

And waits.  All is complete and total darkness now, with only the moon and the stars shedding silver light into the forest.  _Angels, whose sole purpose became to be your hope, your light.  Banishing the dark for you, and only you._ Fear grows inside him, black and ugly.  Sherlock’s already injured.  He’s hurt, and low on power, and maybe three hellhounds was too much for him, maybe he’s hurt somewhere, dying of poison.

John grabs a stick and carves _SHERLOCK_ deep into the soft mud, and waits.  Nothing.  He tries _SHERLOCK HOLMES_ next, then _BAHRAM,_ then every combination of the three he can try, over and over for what feels like hours.

Nothing.  Sherlock does not reappear, does not come back.

“You bastard,” John whispers, anxious, and pacing.  He feels a bit like a hound himself, burning up and lost without a scent, waiting and waiting and waiting.  “You fucking _promised me._ ”

What did Sherlock say?  We’re close, we’re near the secret, don’t worry I’ll be back soon, the falls, the waterfall—

 _The waterfall,_ John thinks, his mind making the connection in an instant.  Sherlock is going to the waterfall. 

Angels are fire, he said once.  We like the coolness of water sometimes, to still our burning.  Moriarty’s riddle was _Where does the water run into flame, and the flame to solid stone?  I’ll be there for you, if you can find it.  Who knows?  You might even save yourself._ John doesn’t know where water runs to flame, but if it’s nearby, it has to be the waterfall. 

John listens intently for the sound of rushing water.  There, dim in the distance, he can hear it, and he breaks into a run.

The sound of water grows louder and louder, a torrent.  He’s close now, he’s so close.

The trees thin, giving way to rocky ground.  The falls can’t be far now.

Finally he sees them, breaking through the forest to come to a cliffside.  He sees the water first, iridescent in the silver light, plunging off the side of the cliff and dashing down below.  Then he sees the rocks, awful, jagged things, all carved up with the black symbols, and the sacrifice.  A young woman, if he’s not mistaken.  Her blood stains the grass.  He sees the fire in the depths of the water, black smoke rising, and it’s hell down there, it has to be hell. 

Then, he sees _them._

Sherlock and Moriarty, except no, they’re not this time, not now, are they?  They are Bahram and Sammael, they are the angels, and they hold glistening silver swords and their wings are outstretched.

John wasn’t aware that there was a distinction between Sherlock and Bahram, but he can see it now, feel it like thunder on his tongue.  Sherlock is a genius, fierce and fast and sometimes too much, but Bahram is an _angel._ Bahram is living fire, and if he were the sort of man to shrink away from his friends, he would be hiding from Sherlock now.

But he isn’t, and he can’t help but stare.  He wants to touch those wings. 

Not Moriarty’s, because his wings are ugly.  The feathers, once white, are dirty and brown.  They look shriveled, starved, and they’re singed at the ends, twisted into impossible shapes.

Sherlock’s are ragged also, a clean, raven-black gossamer, tattered in some places, tangled in others.  The right wing hangs limp. 

But they’re _beautiful._ The colors of a raven, sleek green, flashes of blue, a splash of purple, are woven into the feathers, shining in the dim light.  Sherlock’s wings are long, narrow, and flared.  Sherlock’s wings are soft-looking.  _Sherlock’s wings,_ he wants to say, and he can’t look away.  Sherlock’s wings are amazing, and they look like him, they really do.  Dark and long and lean, slightly unkempt, but layered and multicolored, once you get past the intimidation. 

John can barely breathe for the sight of them and his fingers itch, aching. 

“John!” Moriarty calls, his face split into a sharp-toothed grin.  “How _lovely_ of you to join us!  I was just telling Bahram here that you would be along.  Wouldn’t want you to miss the show, now would we?”

John eyes him, coming to stand beside Sherlock under the shelter of his wings.  Sherlock doesn’t look at him, but his good wing comes to wrap around John defensively, protectively.  The feathers just barely brush the back of his neck, a reassurance, and the warmth that rushes through him banishes the fear.  “You should have stayed away,” he says.

“I could never,” John returns.

He thinks Sherlock smiles, just a little.

“Well look at you, clever boys,” Moriarty mocks, amusement in his pitch-dark eyes.  “Wasn’t sure you’d find this place, _detective._ It’s one of my best kept secrets, you know.”

“What is it?”  John asks, curling his fingers around his gun.  He knows it won’t do anything, but the satisfaction of shooting the smarmy cunt would be _exquisite._

“It’s a gateway,” Sherlock says, and Moriarty laughs.

“Oho, very good.  Very good indeed.  How did you guess?”

“Running water,” Sherlock says.  “You need power to open a gateway, power you don’t have.  I know you, Sammael, and your limits.  You’d need an energy source to run your little gate, and what better source than a waterfall?  The water never stops flowing, does it?”

It makes sense now.  The water runs into hellfire, that fire becomes brimstone.  The river is a hole into hell, and Moriarty led them here. He wanted them here. 

“Nope,” Moriarty sings.  “You should _see_ the amount of souls this damn thing collects every year, it’s cra-azy.  The portal’s been open for something like three thousand years because of the waterfall.”

“Why did you bring us here?” John asks. 

Moriarty rolls his eyes.  “This one’s so boring,” he complains.  “Really, Bahram, I thought better of you.  You’re _supposed_ to be extraordinary, but you’re _not!_ ”  Fury washes over them, tasting of sulfur.  Moriarty’s eyes blaze yellow.  “You’re _ORDINARY!_ You betrayed me.”

“He brought us here to kill us, John,” Sherlock says.

“Kill you?”  The demon laughs again, wings like claws curling inwards.  “KILL YOU?  Oh no no no, Bahram dearest, no, killing’s to _easy_ for the likes of you.  You betrayed me.  You became boring.  You decided to stay up there in, serving _them,_ a little fixed star.  Like a fly glued to cardboard.  Pathetic.  So I brought you to the gate to, uh, spice things up a little.”

“You mean to drop us into hell,” John says.

“There’s hope for you yet!  Of course I do.  You _deserve it._ ”

“Leave him alone,” Sherlock snarls. 

“See?  This is what I’m talking about!  You take one of the coldest angels in the whole garrison and give him a human and bam! He becomes a tame little cherub!  I’m really doing this for your own good, you know.  The Bahram I knew was only happy creating worlds for himself.  He would have loathed being a human’s pet.  Can’t you see that our _Father_ destroyed you?  He took everything beautiful about you and made you a slave.  He made you _ordinary._ You’re still on the side of the angels, Bahram, when they’d love to do nothing more than cut off your wings and pin you to the sky.  Pa-the-tic, Bahram.  Or do you prefer _Sherlock_ now?”

“John, get behind me,” Sherlock murmurs, raising his sword.  It gleams in the moonlight, a challenge. 

“Ah ah ah,” Moriarty sings.  “None of that now, brother dearest.  You’re not getting out of this one so easily.”

In the forest, there’s a deep, rumbling snarl, a dozen thirsty throats coming closer.  Hellhound eyes blink in the growing darkness.  There’s twenty of them, then thirty, then forty, then more.  Too many to fight. 

They’re trapped.

“See, there’s only one way out of this,” Moriarty laughs.  “The falls, Bahram.”

“I’ll fight you.”

  1. What ever will you do?”



Sherlock snarls, hot, wordless with fury. 

John closes his eyes.  _Please, God…_ but he’s not a praying man.  He has no faith, does he, none at all, not even now when it matters, when their lives hang in the balance. 

“I wonder, brother,” Moriarty murmurs, his eyes black again, and dull.  “How it will feel to watch your little human be tortured.  We might break our first angel yet.  I bet it will be _excruciating_ for you _._ To watch his every jerk, to hear his every cry.  How long do you think it will take for him to break, mm?  A month?  A year?  He’s a righteous man, so many ten?  A century?”

“I will not,” Sherlock snaps.  “I know what you want me to do, _brother,_ and I will not.”

“Oh, come now, don’t be that way,” Moriarty croons.  “Imagine how much easier it will be.  He’ll go upstairs, you know.  He’ll get his peace.”

“What are you talking about?” John asks, alarmed.  They were talking about hell—the torture and fire and damnation kind of gave it away—but now they aren’t, not anymore.  “Sherlock, what’s going on?”

“I will not kill him to please you,” Sherlock says, through gritted teeth. 

“Not even to save his life?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer.

The demon sighs.  “Pity.  You could have saved him, you know.”

Oh.  Moriarty is going to kill him first, or drag him down first, or whatever.  He’s about to die. 

John closes his eyes again, under the shelter of Sherlock’s wings.  This is the end, then.  They’re finished. 

Sherlock is shaking, fine tremors down to his feathers. 

“It’s alright,” John says.  He grabs Sherlock’s hand again reflexively, and feathers shiver across his neck.  The handprint feels tight, constricting, and his lungs are heavy.  He doesn’t know why he’s the one saying it, but he is, he is, it’s a litany, it’s a prayer, it’s a hymn.  “It’s alright, Sherlock, it’s alright.  We’ll be okay.  We’re finishing this together.  It’ll be over soon.”

“How sweet,” says the fallen angel.  “How _boring._ ”

“John,” says Sherlock.  His eyes are closed to, pain flickering across his face.  “John, do you trust me?”

“Yes,” John whispers.  “Always.”

“I need you to stay very still,” says Sherlock.  “Can you do this for me?”

“Yes.”  He trusts Sherlock. 

Sherlock nods, opens his eyes.  They’re the clearest blue.  “Sammael,” he says, tenderly.  “I’m going to enjoy this.”

John doesn’t see him move.  He’s across the gap in less than a second, wings spread wide, and Moriarty vanishes for a moment beneath the black expanse of them.

There’s a struggle.  The flash of swords, the tangle of wings, the high-pitched cries of birds splitting the air. 

Sammael will be the stronger one, but Sherlock is strong too, and desperate.  He pins Moriarty, sword at his throat, wings outstretched. 

He’s bleeding.

Moriarty laughs.  He laughs.  He laughs and laughs, head thrown back, blood beading at his throat.  His eyes, fully yellow now, flare like a fire.  “Poor little Bahram,” he whispers, slow, intimate.  “You’re boring.  You’re on the side of the angels.”

“John,” Sherlock says.  “Keep your eyes fixed on me.”  There’s a note in his voice, an uncertainty.  A tremor, and it terrifies John to the bone.  He takes a step forward.  “Sherlock?”

“Stay where you are!” 

Moriarty kicks underneath Sherlock, grasping for his sword.  His teeth are daggers. 

“Stay where you are, John,” Sherlock commands.

“Sherlock,” John says, taking another step.  His chest burns, the handprint almost trying to peel itself from his skin. 

“You promised!”

He freezes.

“John,” Sherlock breathes, and that trembling, uncertain note is gone.  His eyes are clear.  Bright.  Resigned.

The hellhounds are closing in. 

“John.”

“Sherlock?”

“Have faith,” Sherlock says fiercely.  So fiercely. 

“What do you mean?”  Panic now, blooming hot in his chest, wild, and he reaches out his hands blindly, desperately.  “Don’t do it, Sherlock, don’t do it.  Please.  Stay with me.”

“It will be alright, John.”

Moriarty kicks again, his fingers wrapping around the hilt of his sword.

“Don’t lie to me—”

“It will be alright,” Sherlock says again.  His wings are spread, bristling.  “Do not look away.  Please don’t—please don’t look away.”

There’s a crack deep inside of him, a clean fracture.  He thinks it might be his heart.  “I won’t,” he promises raggedly.  “I won’t, Sherlock, don’t do this—”

Moriarty surges forward with a shriek, sword drawn, and Sherlock leaps back, raising his own.  It glitters in the light, arching down, and severs Moriarty’s wing clean from the base.

Moriarty screams.  He howls loud enough to wake the dead, blood and blackness spraying from the stump, and his wing falls down into the foam, and Sherlock wraps his arms around his middle and leaps.

For a moment, it’s just Sherlock suspended, his wings wide and beautiful, and he meets John’s eyes one last time and then—

And then, they fall.

John watches them go.  Moriarty is screaming, writhing, struggling, but even as he breaks loose he has only a wing.  He can’t fly. 

Sherlock’s face is peaceful.  Serene.  Angelic, even, his eyes closed.  He furls his wings and doesn’t fight the fall. 

They hit the water.  Instantly the black sigils flare white and the water boils.  Hellhounds surge past John, snapping at him, drawing blood, their teeth burning needles, but they too are falling, and the water swallows up hounds, swallows the two falling angels, swallows Moriarty, swallows Sherlock.

The water boils white hot, light spraying up like foam, a delicate mist, and then is still.

Sherlock Holmes is gone.

John howls.  He roars and screams and rages, and the last hellhound surges past, teeth bared, ripping into his arms and hands before following its master into the water.

Into hell.

John howls, and his vision goes gray.  The fire of a hellhound’s bite roars up, swallowing him whole.

The pain closes over his head.  He, too, falls. 

vii. 

Three days.  John wakes up in a hospital, wrapped so tightly he can’t move.  His wounds burn.  “Sherlock,” he gasps, whispers, the edges of his vision going gray.  “Sherlock—”

There are hands—cool, human hands—pushing him back gently, and soothing words.  “Sleep,” says a vaguely familiar voice.  “You need it.”

John doesn’t want to—he needs to find Sherlock, he has to get to him, he _has to_ —but he can’t help it.  There’s liquid lead curling in his veins, and it drags him down.

He sleeps again.

\-----

Five days.  He’s conscious for ten minutes, gasping and writhing on his bed.  Everything else is blocked out by the _pain,_ blistering tendrils of agony spreading from the bites, hotter than hellfire.  He can’t breathe.

He tries to tell them, the voices, what’s happening to him, tries to call Sherlock, to beg that they let him see his friend, but they make soothing noises and push him down, holding him still.

John burns. 

\-----

Ten days.  He wakes up, and stays awake this time.  The fire is gone and his injuries hurt, but it’s a dull ache now, not a splitting pain. 

He’s healing. 

He doesn’t ask for Sherlock.  He remembers now. 

The doctors speak German at him tenderly, telling him to rest, to heal.  (John doesn’t speak German but he understands anyway.  He wonders if that will fade now that Sherlock’s gone, or if it will stay.)  He does. 

They don’t let him do much, not really.  They seem terrified that he’ll collapse and die if they let him so much as piss by himself, so they hover, keeping him as still and bored as possible.  John doesn’t fight it.  He’s too tired right now.

He sleeps a lot.  It’s easier, he thinks, to just roll over and close his eyes.

\-----

Fourteen days.  He checks—or rather, sneaks—himself out of the hospital and goes back to the forest.  He can’t find their scattered belongings, and gives it up as a bad job after a bit.  He stole a doctor’s clothes and he doesn’t look like an escaped mental patient or anything, so it’s not like he needs his old things.

He does find the trees, though, where he fought hellhounds, and the places where he carved Sherlock’s name deep into the earth.  In the last two weeks it’s rained, so they’re just faint lines now.  Soon, they’ll be nothing at all.

(He searches the sky for a star, a bright one that was once two angels.  He likes to think that one is missing now.  There’s one less light to guide them, come the night.  He really isn’t surprised.)

So instead of going back into the town, he wanders through the woods for a while.  They look so much different in the daylight, all green and reaching branches, brushing against the sky gently.  (John sees, though, burned bark here and there.  Some trees are withering, dying, scarred by fangs and claws.) 

He doesn’t go near the falls.  He can hear them, but he stays away. 

The closest he gets is that towering oak tree, leaning against its battle-scarred bark.  This one has hellhound-wounds too, but unlike its smaller brothers it’s not withering. 

John smiles grimly and grabs his pocketknife, cutting deep and clumsy into the bark without stopping to think.

It’s harder than it looks, carving a tree, but eventually _BAHRAM_ is cut deeply into the old wood.  It will scar over one day, but for now it’s fresh.  It’ll stay.

Satisfied, John turns and limps back to Meiringen.  His leg hurts again.

\-----

Nineteen days.  John’s still in Switzerland, nursing a pint (well, his fifth) in some dingy bar near the French border and Greg Lestrade sits down beside him.

John blinks, looks him up and down, and takes another drink.  “Want anything?” he asks, his voice rougher than it should be.

Lestrade shakes his head.  “I’ll pass.  You gave your doctors quite the scare, you know.  Best hospital in Bern and you slipped right out of there without them seeing you.  I put you there for a reason.”

“It was you who found me,” John says, because of course it makes sense. 

Lestrade nods.  He looks tired, hollowed out.  The shadows under his eyes bloom like bruises, and there’s just a touch more silver in his hair than there was at the start of this whole mess.  “Found you right at the edge of the falls.  Didn’t take much for me to guess what had happened, what with the hellhound bites and all, so I took you to the best hospital I knew and prayed you wouldn’t die.”

“Thanks,” John says, because no matter what he is grateful.  He would’ve died there at the edge of the waterfall. 

Lestrade shrugs.  “What made you leave?  You’ve still got a good month of recovery time with bites like those.  You shouldn’t be moving around.”

“I got bored.”

“Now you sound like him.”  Lestrade’s eyes are even and steady, bright in the dim lighting.  John meets them, just barely. 

“So?”

“He’s dead, John.”

“I know that.  You think I don’t know that?  I was there.  I watched him—” he stops, turns his head from the memory.  “I watched him go over the edge.”

“No, John, I mean he’s _dead._ ”

John smiles.  The effort stings.  “There’s a difference?”

“I don’t know what Bahram told you about angels, but the truth is they can survive most anything.  You can’t kill ‘em with bullets, with knives, with fire.  Can’t drown ‘em, can’t dismember ‘em, can’t burn the lot with salt and holy water.”

Something in John’s chest stirs, right below his breastbone.  He holds very still, waiting. 

“They come back too, sometimes. The strong ones, the determined ones, they can resurrect themselves if they want.” Lestrade pauses, eyeing John’s drink.  “It is very hard to kill an angel.”

 “But?” 

The older man sighs.  “But, the falls are a portal down to the deepest levels of hell.  _Hell,_ John.  Even if he survived the fall, Bahram wouldn’t have lasted long downstairs.  Demons aren’t the most forgiving lot and they hate angels.  Having one in their midst, well.  It must’ve been like sharks round a wounded fish.”

John flinches.  “You’re telling me that he’s dead.  One hundred percent, totally, completely dead.”

“Irrevocably,” Lestrade says. “He’s not coming back, John.”

“What if he’s not dead, though?  What if he’s still alive down there, what if they haven’t killed him yet?”  He can’t help but say these things, can’t help but let them spill out of his mouth, fragile, dripping words he wishes he could catch and bring back.  (Underneath the edge of the bar, _BAHRAM_ is carved in tiny letters.)

Lestrade’s eyes are soft.  Understanding.  “Then you pray he dies soon.  You _pray,_ and hope that there’s still some mercy left in heaven.”

\-----

Twenty-three days.  John makes his way back to London, back home.  He’s at 221b for twenty minutes.  He lets Mrs Hudson cry into his collar for five of those, lets her fuss over him for five more.  Then he goes upstairs and gathers the important things—clothes, his laptop, his cane, dusty from disuse—and leaves again.

“I’ll take care of the rent somehow, Mrs H,” he says. 

She gives him a watery smile.  “It’s the strangest thing, dear, but your rent’s been paid for the next half year.”

He thinks of Mycroft who knew, who knew what lived in his brother’s body and let Bahram stay anyway.  “Maybe not so strange,” he tells her, and gets into a cab and doesn’t look back.

\-----

Thirty-one days.  A month.  His wounds are mostly healed now (they only ache when it rains) and he spends most of his time in the library, going through every book he can find about the supernatural.  (He’s pretty sure the librarians think he’s some sort of Satanist, which is, by the way, a deeply misunderstood and misrepresented term.  He learns that in his first book.) 

Monsters, demons, angels, witches.  It’s like there’s a whole world living under John’s nose and he’s never known about it.  It’s amazing and more than a little frightening, but he saw two angels open a gate into hell.  He’s fought hellhounds with his bare hands.  A little ghost isn’t all that terrifying.

While he learns, he roams London.  He doesn’t sleep well, most nights, and so he ends up on the streets, limping through the darkness. 

Sometimes he stops and carves a name deep into trees or the sides of buildings, _BAHRAM_ in clumsy, aching letters.  Once he even burned it into a railing overlooking the Thames, carefully blackening each letter with an old lighter. 

No one catches him at it, and it makes him feel better, knowing there’s at least remembrance for his friend, that if he dies there will still be something of Bahram left.

He drinks a lot too.  He’s sure Sherlock wouldn’t approve but the man was a nicotine addict.  He has no place to judge.

John reads, and drinks, and walks around the city.  It can’t exactly be called _living_ but it’s better than getting ripped apart by hellhounds, isn’t it? 

 _Baby steps,_ he tells himself.  _Baby steps._

\-----

Sixty-two days.  Two months, and summer is bleeding into autumn, bringing with it chill and gray and rain.  His leg hurts more now and now there’s actually a wound to necessitate the need for a cane. 

John finds Lestrade at a crime scene, berating Anderson and crouched over some poor dead bastard.  He looks up when John comes, tilts his head, a question.  “Everyone clear out,” he orders.  “I want to hear the doctor’s opinion.”

The team, two months post-Sherlock, grumbles more than they usually would but they’re still used to being kicked out of crime scenes.  They go.

“Well?” says Lestrade, eyebrow raised. 

John licks his lips.  “It looks like a ghost,” he says.

Lestrade’s eyebrow, if possible, goes even farther up. 

“I’ve been reading,” John explains.  “And these marks here and here, they’re completely clean.  There’s no cut pattern that points to a weapon being used.  It just looks like a tear.”

“Not bad for a newbie,” Lestrade says, half-smiling.  “Yeah, this was probably a ghost.  The building’s tenants have been reporting supernatural happenings for half a century now.”

John almost smiles himself, pleased. 

“So, you’re thinking about hunting?” 

“Yes,” says John.

“It’s not an easy job,” Lestrade warns.  “No one pays you, most think you’re some kind of criminal, and the work is dangerous at best, lethal at worst.”

“Any more dangerous than running around with an angel?”

“You’ve got a point,” Lestrade says, laughing a little.  “Alright then.  You think you’ve got what it takes? I’ve got some old hunting buddies in Manchester.  Why don’t you pop in and see what they can teach you.  If they’re satisfied with you, come back to me and we’ll get you set up.”

John grins.  “Thanks,” he says.  “I’m ready.”

\-----

Eighty-nine days.  Lestrade’s hunting buddies put him through the wringer.  He hasn’t had to work so hard since the army, and it hurts. 

But it’s a good, clean hurt.  He gets stronger.  Faster.  He remembers how to fight, and learns all the ways a ghost can be killed, the weak points on a werewolf, the wendigo’s soft spot and the demon’s great disadvantage.

After three weeks, they send him back.  He makes sure to carve _BAHRAM_ into the ceiling of his dingy room before he goes.

When he gets back, Lestrade is waiting for him. 

“You turned out alright then?” he asks, looking him up and down critically.

John nods. 

“Good, good.  I’ve got something for you to take a look at.  There are some strange deaths over on the west side, disappearances and then mutilated bodies appearing in impossible places.”

“You’re thinking a ghost?” 

“Looks like it.  We’re going to take care of it.” 

“We?”  John turns to him, a question in his eyes.  Lestrade smiles. 

“I’m off today,” he explains.  “And every hunter should have a partner.  There’s nothing worse than going into the dark places alone.”

John cants his head, considering.  Lestrade is not Sherlock.  He will never, ever be Sherlock, but he thinks Lestrade knows that.  He thinks Lestrade knows that _very_ well.  “Okay,” he says.  “Let’s go.”

\-----

A hundred days.  He and Lestrade get rid of the ghost and two more besides.  (John leaves a _BAHRAM_ carved at each site.) London has no idea what’s going on and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  People like them, who have seen angels and demons, they’re supposed to protect the rest from it. 

It’s good.  It works.  He sleeps a little better now and he hurts a little less.  It’s not living, not like Harry wants—he’s stopped posting on his old blog and she worries, he knows she does—but he’s alive.  He’s still alive.

That’ll be enough for now.

\-----

One hundred and twenty-nine days.  Mrs Hudson calls to tell him that the rent’s been paid for another six months on the flat, but all their things have been moved to storage. 

Mycroft again.

John, who’s in the middle of hunting a wendigo—nasty fucker, that—tells her thank you and that he’ll be round for a cuppa sooner or later.  She sighs and tells him to be careful.

He hangs up.

\-----

One hundred and fifty days.  He goes on hunts alone now, more often than not.  Lestrade still works for the Yard and he’s retired anyway.  He’s not going to give up good, honest work for a chase through the forest after a werewolf. 

(John kills that wolf near Baskerville, and finds that it was once a boy named Henry.  He wonders, then, how many of them are boys before they’re monsters.  He thinks about Sherlock before Bahram.  What was he like?  The same?)

John’s building up a reputation for himself in the hunter’s world.  Wherever he goes there’s always a bed and a drink waiting for him, women with scarred, understanding hands and men with shaded eyes, wearing silver and tattooing wards into their skin.

One hundred and fifty-seven days in he gets a tattoo of his own, a little pentagram to keep the demons at bay.

He hasn’t met one, not yet.  They’re rare when they’re not hunting angels.  But he will.  Oh, he will.

\-----

Two hundred and six days.  A particularly violent drowned spirit half kills him in Loch Ness, strangling and pulling him deeper and deeper into the water. 

It’s a close thing, but just as he’s blacking out an fading away, the spirit lets him go.

He drifts to shore barely conscious, soaked, shivering, _alive,_ and some tourists find him and take care of him until he slips away the next morning before dawn. 

He leaves the Loch Ness spirit alone, but before he goes he’s sure to burn _bahram_ into the stones by the lake.  A thank-you, he thinks, or perhaps a prayer.  He’s not entirely sure which is which, anymore. 

It doesn’t matter anyway.  He moves on.

\-----

Three hundred and sixty-five days.  A year. 

“I’m worried about you,” Lestrade says, voice a haze.  “You’re not doing so well, John.  You need to stop.  You need to rest.”

John smiles kindly.  “I’m fine,” he promises.  “Just a little worn down, is all.  I’ll be right as rain in a week or two.”

He doesn’t know, anymore, who he’s trying to convince.

\-----

Four hundred days.  He meets a ghost and her name is Mary.  (Or at least, he thinks he meets her.  It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s imagined these days.  A consequence of dealing with the supernatural.) 

Mary isn’t a violent ghost.  Rather, she is one of many who just sort of wander the streets of London, floating high above the rest of them, going their own way day after day.  John meets her in the park, startled to see her, amazed that no one else can.

She smiles for him.

“Why are you here?” he asks her, four hundred and twenty days in.  “Why can’t you just move on, like most of them do?” 

“We have unfinished business,” she explains.  She’s beautiful in a sort of divine way, and her smile makes his heart flutter.  “We stay because we’re weighed down.  We want to go on, but we can’t.  We’re needed here.”

“It must be very sad,” he says.

“Not always,” Mary laughs, a bit of birdsong in her.  “It’s not as bad as you might think.  Sometimes we meet people like you, people who can see us.”

“Well I am very glad to have met you.”

She beams.  “It was lovely meeting you as well, John.  You’ll visit?”

“Of course,” he says, aware that it’s not the best idea, making promises to a ghost, but he’s lonely and she’s lovely, and of course he’ll come back, of course.

Mary’s smile eases something inside of him.  “It’s a date.”

\-----

Five hundred and seventy-one days.  He hunts.  He kills monsters.  He helps people, and sees Mary in-between. 

Soon bits of Bahram have gone across three continents, as far as a little town in Korea (water spirit, nasty business) and as close as Mary’s park bench, carefully carved into the wooden planks.

“He was important to you,” Mary says, sitting beside him.  Her presence, unlike so many ghosts’, is warm. 

“Yes,” John says.

Mary sighs.  “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

She smiles.  “It wasn’t yours either, but you still feel that way.”

\-----

Seven hundred and thirty days.  Two years.  Another round of drinks, and this time Lestrade doesn’t come because John isn’t in London, he’s in America, some tiny little town that’s been having a nasty vampire problem.

There’s no one in the bar except John himself and two other men, a shortish bloke in a trenchcoat and his broody friend.

John drinks, and tries not to listen to them but he can’t help it.  The broody one is loud.

“I’m tellin’ ya, Cas,” he says.  “There’s gotta be somethin’ in the water, these vamps are stronger than they should be—”

“Excuse me,” John says because he’s curious now.  “Did you say _vamps?_ As in vampires?”

The broody one freezes and glares, no doubt working out a lie, and trenchcoat narrows his bright—too bright, almost familiar—eyes. 

“Listen here, bud,” says Broody, but John’s not looking at him, not anymore. He’s staring at Trenchcoat, hungrily, rabidly, because he _knows._

“You’re an angel,” he breathes.

Broody snarls, half-stands before Trenchcoat—and _angel_ —tugs him back down.  “It’s alright, Dean,” he says softly.  “I’ll handle it.”

“Handle it,” John starts, lifting his hands in a gesture of peace, but it’s too late, there’s a hiss and the rush of wings—

Then, darkness.

\-----

Seven hundred and thirty-one days.  He has a dream that he’s in a great white space, and Trenchcoat is there with him.

“I’m so sorry,” Trenchcoat says solemnly, his eyes blue and sincere and earnest.  “Bahram was yours?”

John shrugs loosely, staring at this other angel intently.  He hasn’t met one, not in two years of hunting, but then he’s not really been looking.  “You know me?” he says instead.

“My kind leaves a mark,” says the angel, and he gently presses a hand to John’s chest.  The missing burn seems as a hole, yawning inside his chest.  He shudders. 

The angel’s eyes are sympathetic, which is strange. 

“I thought angels didn’t care,” John says. 

The angel shrugs.  “A side effect,” he explains.  “The longer we spend on earth, the more we care.  There’s something about your little world that changes us.”

“Sorry?”  John tries.

The angel seems to be laughing at him.  “There is no need for apology, John Watson.  You have done nothing wrong.”

He tilts his head.  “You said that Bahram was mine?  What did you mean by that?”

“Bahram marked you,” the angel explains.  “He chose to save you.  That is a deeper connection than you can possibly fathom.”

“What?”

“Angels are vast, little human,” says the angel.  “We are bigger than you are, and that’s hard for most humans to unerstand.”

“That is the most irritating non-answer I’ve heard since medical school,” John says.  The angel squints at him. 

“My apologies.”

“You don’t seem all that sorry.”

“I am not,” the angel acknowledges.  “But I have been reliably informed that such platitudes bring peace to your kind.”

“Who the hell told you that?”

The angel sighs.  “It is not of import.  I did not come to you to speak of such things.”

“Then why did you come?”

The angel meets his eyes.  “To tell you that you are not alone, John Watson.  There are angels all around you.  If you ever need us, all you have to do is pray.”

“I’ve done enough praying, I think,” he murmurs.  “The angel I want isn’t coming back.”

“Faith, John Watson,” says the blue-eyed angel.  “Have faith.”

John wants to ask, “how?”  He wants to ask, “why?” He wants to scream, to rage, to cry, but it’s been two years.  He’s hollowed out.  He has no anger left to spend. 

“I am sorry,” the angel repeats, a low rumble of thunder.  “This was never meant to happen to you.”

“Then why did it?”

But the angel is gone.  John Watson is alone again.

\-----

Eight hundred and fifty-four days.  London again, the dead of winter.  Everything is frozen and cold, and Mary comes to him. 

“You look sad,” she says.  He smiles and it feels lopsided on his face. 

“Not sad,” he says.  “Tired, I think.”  He hurts all over.

Mary sighs.  “There’s a reason I’m trapped in the park,” she whispers.  “There’s a reason I can’t leave.”

He waits, expectant. 

“Ghosts are dead,” she murmurs.  “We’re dead, and we’re alone.  We don’t have anything to do, so we fall into patterns.  Routines.  Ruts.  I’ve been walking this park for fifty years, John.  I’m in a rut.  I can’t get out.”

“Do you want to?”

She smiles, and this time it’s sad.  “Sometimes I don’t,” she says.  “Sometimes I’m happy here.  But most of the time, I want to leave.  I want to do something different.  I want to go on.”

“So why don’t you?” he asks, not out of rudeness but genuine curiosity.

Mary smiles again.  “Why don’t you leave your rut?  Because it’s comfortable, it’s familiar.  I know it, just like you know your rut.”

“I’m not in a rut,” he splutters, trying for outrage.

She laughs at him.  “You hunt, you come here, and then you hunt again.  Your only friend is a dead girl.  You’re in a rut, John.  That’s okay.  I understand.  But I don’t want to see you end up like me, coming back here again and again until you die.  That would be so sad, don’t you understand?”

“Not really,” he says, because it’s true.

Mary sighs and kisses his cheek, a spot of warmth blooming against the cold.  “I love you, John Watson,” she whispers.  “But you’re killing yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

“Don’t be sorry.  Change.”

“I don’t know how,” he admits.  Two and a half years is a long time.  He’s built a pattern, he’s built—not a life, not exactly, but the bare bones of one—around this. 

“No one ever does,” she says.  “But we have to try, don’t we?”

\-----

Nine hundred days.  He tries, he really does.  He calls up Lestrade again and they share a few pints, trading war stories.  Lestrade offers him an in on the case he’s working.  John accepts. 

He hunts less, stays in most nights now.  Lestrade gives him work as a consultant and Mycroft—ever guilty, or perhaps loyal—makes sure he doesn’t starve. 

He only goes to the park once a week now, to feed the ducks and talk to Mary.

He finds himself laughing at something Lestrade snarks at Anderson and it’s the first time in a long while. He limps less.  The rains come and his wounds ache but he ignores them and goes to tea with Mrs Hudson. 

He thinks about getting a dog.

\-----

Nine hundred and sixty-two days.  He smiles more.  He smiles. 

Mary disappears. 

He searches for her, his heart breaking, but she’s gone. 

It looks like she’s broken her rut too. 

He drinks a pint for her, plays rugby with some of Lestrade’s DI pals. 

He still goes to the park and sits on their bench, _Bahram_ carved into the slats.

It’s so quiet.

\-----

One thousand days.  Strange, he thinks.  So very strange. 

The Yard hires him on as a DI.  He suspects Mycroft again, pulling the strings from his little club. 

He hunts even less, only every now and then now.  He still hasn’t met a demon.  He’s starting to think he won’t. 

He talks to people now, friendly, warm like he used to be. 

He lives. 

It’s enough.

\-----

One thousand and ninety-five days.  Three years to the day.  He gets a call, and Mrs Hudson is crying. 

“I’m sorry, John,” she says.  “But I’ve got to sell the flat now, I can’t just leave it gathering dust.  I’ve got some people coming to look at it tomorrow at half-three.  I just thought I should tell you.”

“Yeah,” he says, sitting up.  There’s an ache in his chest again, one he’s ignored for a long, long time now.  “Yeah, I understand.  That’s fine.  It’s time, right?”

“I just thought,” she says, stops.  Breathes, and starts again.  “I just thought you might like to pop in for a bit, say your goodbyes. You left in such a hurry last time, I thought you might want to reconnect with the old place before it’s gone.”

He doesn’t want to go.  He really, really doesn’t want to go, but he has to, doesn’t he?  This is his last chance for—closure, maybe, for peace—so he goes.

He hails a cab—wary of the cabbie, he’s never gotten over that little episode—and tells the man where to go.

The ride is quiet. 

He gets out and Baker Street is exactly like he remembered, mostly grey and a little dingy, but a homey little place.  There’s Mrs H’s sandwich shop, there’s the staircase, there’s the spot where Sherlock leaned against the door, laughing, and the force of the memory doubles John over, is a knife in his chest, hellhound teeth in his heart.

He breathes. 

The paint on the door’s peeling a bit.  Inside smells like dust, and all their furniture is gone, but he can _remember_ it.  The armchair, just squishy enough, the acid burns, the damn smiley face in the wall.  The dark spot where Sherlock’s couch stood, and the patch of dust where the skull rested. 

The windows are grimy, but there’s their street. 

It hurts.  It hurts.  It hurts and it’s a breathless sort of pain, seizing right below his breastbone, but it’s a good hurt.  A clean hurt, he thinks.  Closure.

He walks the length of the flat once, twice, reliving it all.  Memories cling to his skin with the dust and he lets them.  _Break the rut,_ Mary says.  _You can do it._

Pain, and he closes his eyes. 

He can smell Sherlock, soap, sweat, something he now knows to be feathers, a hint of nicotine and blood. 

John smiles.  “You ungrateful bastard,” he mutters fondly, running his hands over the peeling wallpaper.  “You stupid, selfish arsehole.”

He doesn’t think.  He unfolds the knife from his pocket, holding it steady.  It goes through the wallpaper easily and the wall easily enough, and he bears down with three years of practice.

S, then an H, then E and R, L, O, C, and finally, with a slightly unsteady hand, K.  For the first time in three years he carves _SHERLOCK,_ deeply, so deeply no amount of dry wall will ever erase it completely.  Sherlock will stay here at 221b forever.  No one can change that. 

 _Names are a powerful thing,_ he remembers.  _Names are the most powerful thing in the world._

John turns to go, running his fingers over the walls one last time.  The floorboards creak under his feet and dust swirls up to meet him, accompanying him all the way to the door.  He pauses, hesitating, torn to leave it for the final time. 

It’s so quiet.

Then, there’s a soft, faint, barely-there rustle, like feather sliding over feather. 

John freezes.  Behind him, there’s the rush of wings.

He turns, scarcely daring to believe it.  Not now, after all this time.

He turns, and smiles so widely he feels his ribs crack open.  “Sherlock?”


End file.
